Many want to know what happens at the Santa Barbara Bowl in addition to hosting awesome concerts. Well, I’m glad you asked. Aside from our robust outreach programs and educational opportunities, the Bowl likes to use its resources and connections to assist the Santa Barbara County community.

For example, the Bowl offers up to 37 commercial concerts per year, but why not also use the turnkey space for training classes and meetings to help educate the members of our community? Novel concept, right? We think so too, which is why we recently hosted grantsmanship training in our Greenroom and Backstage.

At this training session we provided a place for members of our community — and people from all over the United States — to learn how to acquire grant funding for their prospective non-profit organizations, public universities and governmental institutions.

The weeklong session was facilitated by The Grantsmanship Center, the original grant training program in the United States, which has served over 125,000 people since its inception in 1972. Within their program they provide essential training to empower attendees to not only write effective grant proposals, but also to understand and critique their process in a way that helps them create a sustainable change within their organization.

Being that the Santa Barbara Bowl is a not-for-profit organization as well, this was a tremendous opportunity and one that was near and dear to our hearts. So much so, that Bowl staff members also attended the training sessions themselves. Throughout this program, the attendees met in groups to discuss grant-writing practices. In the last few days of the training, the attendees were split into teams and created their own grant proposals. Once the groups had completed their proposals, they then evaluated one another, offering feedback based on their nearly acquired skills.

At the end of the training, each attendee was able to leave knowing they learned how to successfully write a grant; they also used these lessons to help them create one of their very own. This sample grant now serves as a template for future grant-writing ventures. The grantsmanship training is sustainable in this way and encourages its attendees to take what they’ve learned and put it to practice in their everyday lives.

Want to help keep this type of program a priority for Santa Barbara? Visit: https://sbbowl.com/give/donate!