Examples of successful creative grant/fellowship/scholarship applications?
If you go to or are near to a college or university with a graduate program, there is typically a graduate fellowship office. The graduate fellowship office at my school is specifically there for my school’s students, but you can just walk in and ask for their fellowship book for examples of successful fellowship applications. They have a huge one filled with often very dated examples for the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, which can be related to international research or writing, as long as you are a U.S. Citizen. The NSF requires that you be in graduate school, but is one of the most generous fellowships available at $30,000 a year (plus they pay your school fees). Philip Guo’s site is vastly useful on the NSF, though does not contain any examples of successful applications.
Program officers, particularly those in federally-funded programs, are very likely to send you examples of successful applications upon request. At my old job, we would routinely get successful NEH fellowship applications to use as examples for interested faculty members. As RachelSmith said, if you’re at a university, get in touch with your sponsored programs office or the research center that is most closely aligned with your discipline. They’ll have examples and may be able to get even more for you. Also, your university may have a subscription to Community of Science, particularly its funding database. Don’t be fooled by the name; it includes opportunities from pretty much any discipline you can think of. (Even if you’re not enrolled or a staff member, if your local university has COS and publicly accessible computer terminals, you should use those computers to access COS.
