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I found something there.   this tell me that even when we are in the corner, there is still some

good thing there.  such as we need not worry about someone will attact from the back.

The subject of this short course is proposal writing. But the proposal does not stand alone. It must be part of a process of planning and of research on, outreach to, and cultivation of potential foundation and corporate donors.

This process is grounded in the conviction that a partnership should develop between the nonprofit and the donor. When you spend a great deal of your time seeking money, it is hard to remember that it can also be difficult to give money away. In fact, the dollars contributed by a foundation or corporation have no until they are attached to solid programs in the nonprofit sector.

This truly is an ideal partnership. The nonprofits have the ideas and the capacity to solve problems, but no dollars with which to implement them. The foundations and corporations have the financial resources but not the other resources needed to create programs. Bring the two together effectively, and the result is a dynamic collaboration.

You need to follow a step-by-step process in the search for private dollars. It takes time and persistence to succeed. After you have written a proposal, it could take as long as a year to obtain the funds needed to carry it out. And even a perfectly written proposal submitted to the right prospect might be rejected for any number of reasons.

Raising funds is an investment in the future. Your aim should be to build a network of foundation and corporate funders, many of which give small gifts on a fairly steady basis and a few of which give large, periodic grants. By doggedly pursuing the various steps of the process, each year you can retain most of your regular supporters and strike a balance with the comings and goings of larger donors.

The recommended process is not a formula to be rigidly adhered to. It is a suggested approach that can be adapted to fit the needs of any nonprofit and the peculiarities of each situation. Fundraising is an art as well as a science. You must bring your own creativity to it and remain flexible.

Gathering Background Information

The first thing you will need to do in writing your proposal is to gather the documentation for it. You will require background documentation in three areas: concept, program, and expenses.

If all of this information is not readily available to you, determine who will help you gather each type of information. If you are part of a small nonprofit with no staff, a knowledgeable board member will be the logical choice. If you are in a larger agency, there should be program and financial support staff who can help you. Once you know with whom to talk, identify the questions to ask.

This data-gathering process makes the actual writing much easier. And by involving other stakeholders in the process, it also helps key people within your agency seriously consider the project's to the organization.

Concept
It is important that you have a good sense of how the project fits with the philosophy and mission of your agency. The need that the proposal is addressing must also be documented. These concepts must be well-articulated in the proposal. Funders want to know that a project reinforces the overall direction of an organization, and they may need to be convinced that the case for the project is compelling. You should collect background data on your organization and on the need to be addressed so that your arguments are well-documented.

Program
Here is a check list of the program information you require:

• the nature of the project and how it will be conducted;
• the tible for the project;
• the anticipated outcomes and how best to evaluate the results; and
• staffing and volunteer needs, including deployment of existing staff and new hires.

Expenses
You will not be able to pin down all the expenses associated with the project until the program details and timing have been worked out. Thus, the main financial data gathering takes place after the narrative part of the master proposal has been written. However, at this stage you do need to sketch out the broad outlines of the budget to be sure that the costs are in reasonable proportion to the outcomes you anticipate. If it appears that the costs will be prohibitive, even with a foundation grant, you should then scale back your plans or adjust them to remove the least cost-effective expenditures.

Basic psychoacoustical knowledge such as loudness perception or spectral masking can be described by mathematical equations and models. These models should be appplied for controlling the gain of hearing aids. Innovative control systems, such as inverse loudness models, will likely be implemented and provide optimal use of the residual area of audibility for the hearing impaired.

Physical or technical methods can suppress either envirenmental noises or annoying acoustical feedback whistling. The basic building blocks of these concepts are adaptive filters can control systems modifying the filter coeffecients according to specific criteria such as: speech—present or not, or feedback whistling-yes or no.

Directional microphones or array processing can significantly enhance speech intelligibility in background noise. Today’s solutions could go further if the size of the device were not an issue. We must still solve cosmetic issues to realize more efficient array processors.

Any fittingformula can predict target gains  the hearing instrument should deliver at a muber of frequencies for a specific hearing loss. Unfortunately, two individuals with identical audiograms may not perform equally with the same gain preion.

The problems associated with hearing loss are far more complex than the simple elevated hearing thresholds depicted in standard audiograms. Compensating for elevated hearing thresholds is essential to restore audibility, but amplification alone is not enough to optimally compensate for a loss in speech understanding.

Therefore, hearing instruments must be even more sophisticated if they are to help the user take full advantage of residual hearing. They need to provide an undistorted and noise-free amplified signal to the impaired ear in order to minimize masking of important speech components. Hearing instruments users often complain that they hear well in quiet but not in noisy surroundings. The first-order effect in a noisy envirenment is that speech consonants, which are less intense than most vowel sounds, are masked by noise and are therefore not heard.

An important objective of any hearing instrument is to supress the noise component and to amplify the desired component of a noisy signal. In most cases, the desired signal is speech and in some cases it is music. Digital hearing instruments offer new capabilities in this area traditional amplification strategies deed in chapter 4.

Damage to hearing can occur in any one of several areas of the ear. Damage to the outer and middle ear often causes a conductive loss which means that the signal strenth reaching the middle ear is reduced. This type of loss is usually treated effectively with amplification of the types discussed in chapter 4.

Damage to  the inner ear, usually referred to as a sensorineural loss, can also cause attenuation of signal strenth but various types of signal distortion can also be present. The inner ear contains rows of inner and outer cells which play an essential role in converting mechannical vibrations into electrical information. Damage to inner and outer hair cells usually causes a loss in sensitivity, a loss of  dynamic range, and frequency selectivity. Hearing aids do not deal uniformly well with this types of loss.

The potential for correcting this wide variety fo complex deficiencies in an impaired ear has improved significantly with the introduction of digital signal processing in hearing instruments. These instruments provide frequency-specific amplification to reconstruct a preferred loudness level as required by commonly used fitting formulas such as 1/2 gain rule, NAL, POGO, DSL, etc.

Nonlinear amplification is quite effectively applied to remedy abnormal growth of loudness. Level-dependent compression is a commonly used amplification strategy. A variety of input-output curves has been possible in analog instruments for some time, and theseare also applied in digital instruments to achieve audibility for quiet sounds without undue discomfort for loud sounds. Digital instruments can employ multiband amplification more effectively than analog instruments, and this is routinely done as requied for the particular hearing loss. Proper choices must be made for the time constants of the dynamic compression as these do affect the overall sound qualityfo the amplified signal.

Binaural  loss is usually corrected with hearing instruments fitted to both ears, which can be effective. But an optimal binaural hearing correction requires communication between the  processors on either ear in order to achieve effective spatial hearing and localization. Noise reduction is an important element in this type of processing

Central processor damage is difficult to diagnose and extremely difficult to correct with a hearing instrument. Noise reduction algorithms, directional microphones, and adaptive sound scene adaptation can all contribute to a solution for this problem

These factors and loss of frequency and temporal discrimination, sensitivity to noise, and abnormal growth of loudness sensation require tools and methods that have only recently become available to hearing instrument developers and health care professionals with th advent of digital technology for hearing instruments.

Hearing instruments can now be designed to deal with more of the elements of hearing loss than ever before. No longer does a designer have to add components to an amplifier to increase or change ally. Instead, ality is now determined by the computational capacity of the small computer or microprocessor that has become an important component in the digital hearing instrument. ality of these system is determined not by manipulating electronic components but by manipulating the set of sequenced instructions in the algorithms that are performed by the microprocessor or digital signal processor.

While scholarship, grant money and government-backed student loans -- whose interest rates are capped -- have taken up some of the slack, many families and individual students have turned to private loans, which carry fees and interest rates that are often variable and up to 20 percent.

Kristin Cole, 30, who graduated from Michigan State University's law school and lives in Grand Rapids, Mich., owes $150,000 in private and government-backed student loans. Her monthly payment of $660, which consumes a quarter of her take-home pay, is scheduled to jump to $800 in a year or so, confronting her with stark financial choices.

"I could never buy a house. I can't travel; I can't do anything," she said. "I feel like a prisoner."

A legal aid worker, Cole said she may need to get a job at a law firm, "doing something that I'm not real dedicated to, just for the sake of being able to live."

Parents are still the primary source of funds for many students, but the dynamics were radically altered in recent years as tuition costs soared and sources of readily available and more costly private financing made higher education seemingly available to anyone willing to sign a loan application.

Students with no credit history and no relatives to co-sign loans (or co-signing parents with tarnished credit) were willing to bet that high-priced loans were a trade-off for a shot at the American dream. But high-paying jobs are proving elusive for many graduates.

"This is literally a new form of indenture ... something that every American parent should be scared of," said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

More than $17 billion in private student loans were issued last year, up from $4 billion a year in 2001. Outstanding student borrowing jumped from $38 billion in 1995 to $85 billion last year, according to experts and lawmakers.

Rocketing tuition fees made borrowing that much more appealing. Consumer prices on average rose less than 29 percent over the past 10 years while tuition, fees, and room and board at four-year public colleges and universities soared 79 percent to $12,796 a year and 65 percent to $30,367 a year at private institutions, according to the College Board.

Scholarship and grant money have increased, yet for almost 15 years, the maximum available per person in government-guaranteed student loans, which by law can't charge rates above 6.8 percent, has remained at $23,000 total for four years. That's less than half the average four-year tuition, room and board of $51,000 at public colleges and $121,000 at private institutions.

Sallie Mae, formally known as SLM Corp., has been on the winning side of the loan bonanza. Its portfolio of 10 million customers includes $25 billion in private and $128 billion in government-backed education loans. However, private-equity investors who had offered $25 billion to buy the company backed out last week, citing credit market weakness and a new law cutting billions of dollars in subsidies to student lenders.

Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co., Wachovia Corp. and Regions Financial Corp. are also big players in the private student loan business. And there has been an explosion in specialized student loan lenders, such as EduCap, Nelnet Inc., NextStudent Inc., Student Loan Corp., College Loan Corp., CIT Group Inc. and Education Finance Partners Inc.

The question is whether everyone who borrowed will be able to repay. Experts don't track default rates on private student loans, but many predict sharp increases in years to come.

Dr. Paul-Henry Zottola, a 35-year-old periodontist in Rocky Hill, Conn., faces paying $1,600 a month on his student loan on top of a $2,300 mortgage payment and $1,500 on the loan he took out to start his practice.

His credit record remains solid but he owes more than $300,000 in student loans as he and his wife, Heather, an elementary school administrator, raise two young children.

"It would be very easy to feel crushed by it," Zottola said in an interview. "All my income for the next 10 years is spoken for."

Meanwhile, complaints about marketing of private loans -- like ads promising to approve loans worth $50,000 in just minutes -- are on the rise. The complaints have made their way to lawmakers, who see a need to regulate the highly profitable and diverse group of companies and the loans they make to college students.

In August, the Senate Banking Committee approved a bill that would mandate clearer disclosure of rates and terms on private student loans. The bill also would require a 30-day comparison shopping period after loan approval, during which time the offer terms could not be altered.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said many graduates who borrowed owe as much if not more than most homeowners owe on mortgages. Unlike mortgages with clear consumer disclosure requirements -- even from nonbank lenders, private lending is "the Wild West of the student loan industry," he said in a telephone interview.

Critics say what happened in the mortgage market could happen in the student loan market. Cuomo, who conducted a nationwide investigation, said the parallels between the two markets are "provocative."

Demand for bundled student loans sold to institutional investors worldwide fueled lending to students. The market for private student loan-backed securities leapt 76 percent last year, to $16.6 billion, from $9.4 billion in 2005, according to Moody's Investors Service.

The student loan-backed securities market has yet to suffer noticeable effects of a global credit squeeze that was triggered this summer by a mortgage meltdown of borrowers with risky credit.

"Once the economy starts to slow, you're going to see a large increase of these people in bankruptcy court," said Robert Manning, a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology who has written about college students and credit cards.

A 2005 change to bankruptcy law puts private student loans on par with child support and alimony payments: Lenders can garnish wages if someone doesn't pay.

Cuomo's probe revealed what he calls an "appalling pattern of favoritism" for student lenders that provided kickbacks, revenue-sharing plans and trips to college administrators in exchange for recommended lender status. Other critics allege widespread corrupt arrangements propelled a student loan boom.

Lenders deny such charges, arguing that industry growth resulted from surging education costs and that higher interest rates are justified for unsecured loans to borrowers with blemished or insufficient credit records.

"Lenders take 100 percent of the repayment risk on flexible private-education loans made to people with limited credit histories, on which they will not get repaid for several years," Barry Goulding, a Sallie Mae official, told Congress last spring.

New regulations could dry up access to education financing, he and other industry executives argue. Some experts are skeptical, predicting waves of student loan delinquencies and defaults on what is outstanding.

"Should private student loans suffer the same sort of failure as (subprime) mortgages, as students graduate or drop out and find themselves unable to pay, we will do serious damage not only to the lives of many students but also to the economic and social fabric of our country that depends on college graduates for its strength," said Luke Swarthout at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

Here are some advantages to writing a formal query letter:

• A well-written query letter helps prove to an editor that you are qualified to write the piece.
• Sending completed articles blindly can indicate to an editor that you either failed to sell the article before, are submitting an article that was not written specifically for their publication or are attempting to resell a previously published article.
• Short, informal queries will often go unread or will be given less weight by an editor if they are a stickler for the formal process.
• A formal, detailed query gives you the opportunity to do preliminary research for a piece that can then be quickly converted into an article.
• When submitting a query to an online publication, your query will look better than 90% of the other queries being submitted to that publication.

In the age of email, much can be said for the ability to quickly send off a brief query. This is very possible these days, and may result in more sales than writing a formal query for each publication you wish to write an article for. Still, if you want to impress an editor, online or otherwise, a formal, well-written query letter is a way to do it. Below is a point-by-point deion of how to write a query letter.

Know your target

• Study any publication before you submit a query letter.
• Get writer’s guidelines for the publication if they are available.
• Study the publication’s masthead to identify the appropriate editor for your query. Do not rely on Writer’s Market. Editors change jobs frequently.
• You may send the same subject query to more than one publication, as long as they do not compete and you have taken the time to make sure the subject is appropriate for both publications.

Your query letter should have a professional look.

• There should be no spelling or grammar errors.
• Be sure to include the date on your letter. This can be important if you feel later on that your idea has been stolen.
• It should be addressed to the appropriate editor. Use their full name and do not use Mr. Mrs. or otherwise. The exception to this rule is Dr. or other professional title.
• The publication name and address should be correct.
• The salutation should be formal.
• If mailed, the paper and the letterhead should be clean and professional. Standard 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper should be used.
• Single-space your paragraphs and double-space between paragraphs.
• If mailed, the Query should include Self Addressed Stamped Envelope (SASE)
  so that the editor can return your article or reply to you conveniently.
• Include your name, postal address, email address and phone number in the letterhead or at the bottom of the letter.

Your query letter should be interesting

• Your query should introduce a fresh idea/topic/angle.
• The idea should be set off in the type so it is easily viewed.
• Your idea should be presented at the very beginning of your letter.
• Your lead-in should excite the editor.

Your query letter should be specific

• Keep your query letter to a single page in length.
• Lay out exactly what you intend to include and exclude from your article.
• Give a proposed article length. Round to the nearest 100 for under 2000 words and to nearest 500 for articles over that length. The length should be appropriate for that publication.
• Identify which section of the publication you believe your article fits within.

Your query letter should be persuasive

• Include writing samples that are appropriate to the publication, article topic, and writing style you believe the publication is looking for.
• Present any credentials or awards you have that show you are qualified to write, especially about this subject.
• Identify other similar publications that have published your work.
• Identify any sources you have that you feel would help persuade the editor.
• Your article should show why you are the best and only person to write this article for them.
• Close your letter with a phrase such as: “I look forward to hearing from you. Please write or call if you have any questions.”

Respond promptly when a query is accepted

• When an editor expresses interest in (solicits) your article, send it to them promptly. In your cover letter, remind them of their request.
• You do not need to enclose an SASE when sending your article.

What you should not do in your query letter

• Do not mention who has rejected the piece before.
• Do not include other people’s statements about your article.
• Do not tell the editor how long and hard you have been working on this article.
• Do not mention the assistance of others.
• Do not tell them that the piece still needs work.
• Do not request advice, comments, criticism or analysis.
• Do not talk about how thrilling it would be to be published.
• Do not include inappropriate or off-subject information about yourself.
• Do not discuss the rights you wish to sell.
• Do not discuss price or payment.
• Do not give your social security number.
• Do not give or discuss copyright information.
• Do not wear out your welcome by writing too much or failing to get to the point.
• Do not query without studying the publication enough to know whether your idea is appropriate.
• Do not waste your time querying an unreceptive editor over and over again.
• Do not present ideas for several different articles in the same letter. This can be done once you have established a rapport with an editor, but should not be donein a blind query.
• Do not use obscenities or inappropriate content.
• Do not send inappropriate, off-subject samples.

Sample Query Letter:

Max Swift
Securities Editor
Money Bucks Magazine
1010 E. 10200^th Street
New York, NY
August 22, 2000

Dear Max Swift,

Proposed Article:
You’ve Got Fraud! How Internet con artists can crush your portfolio

Last Monday, the Enforcement Section of the Massachusetts Securities Division ordered a temporary cease and desist order against three men it accuses of manipulating the stock market by flooding Yahoo.com with tens of thousands of false and misleading statements about Biomatrix Inc (BXM.N) and Genzyme Corp (GENZ.O). This is the latest in a growing series of civil and criminal lawsuits against people who manipulate stocks through mass emails or in this case, by posting misleading statements on financial discussion boards. My article will detail the trend from the perspective of three people.

• A securities trader whose legitimate stock analysis email newsletter has contended with fake announcements by people who acquired his mailing list.
• A lawyer who represented a client in a case similar to the Massachusetts case.
• An investor who blames her loss of $70,000 in the stock market on fraudulent discussion-board posting.

In my article I will discuss the negative effects of fraud on investors and companies. I will also discuss how you can protect yourself from fraud. More importantly, I will show how you can be victimized by the trend even when you don’t receive a fraudulent email or read a misleading post. Because such fraud can cause an individual stock to both rise and fall dramatically, investors who never see the misleading information can still end up investing in a bad stock or dumping a good one.

My article would be an excellent fit in your Caveat Emptor section’s ongoing coverage of investment potholes. As is customary for that section, I will include a sidebar of ways you can protect yourself from Internet investment fraud. My advice will include: verifying any news through conventional sources, keeping an eye out for any unusual email from online newsletters, never trusting blind e-mails, and carefully watching or avoiding discussion boards altogether. The last point, that discussion boards rarely result in good investments, will also be a focus of the article. If you would like, this can also be turned into a sidebar.

In addition to the three sources above, I have access to dozens of other securities professionals, legal authorities and investors. I have been a professional investment counselor for the past fifteen years and was one of the earliest adopters of Internet trading. As a former state representative, I authored several investment fraud bills that are still on the Arizona law books. For the past two years I have written a weekly investment article for Phoenix Business Insider. I have also published investment-related articles in Worthwhile Investor, Smart Stock Analyst and Fund Advocate.

Enclosed are reprints of three of my recent articles covering investment and the Internet. These articles will demonstrate both my knowledge of the subject and my ability to convey that knowledge to the reader. Your readers need to know about this looming crisis and how it can affect their investment strategies. Please call my office to discuss any further details or resolve any questions. Thank you for your consideration.

Regards,
John Doe
Box 901010
Scottsdale, AZ
85528
408-101-0011
Enclosures:
Clips
SASE

About the letter

This author of this query letter may or may not have some advantages over you. The author is someone who has all of the experience and credentials necessary to write the article, and has already secured sources. You may not have everything he has, but you need to know how it sounds when you do.

Note that the query is timely. The author may have been researching Internet fraud for months, but he went out and found an article that ties his research to that week’s news. Also note that none of his sources are from the particular case he mentions. Instead, he uses that case as a selling point for his research. Quite possibly he has already written a related article for his column, and he now wants to reuse part of it to make a national sale. There is nothing wrong with this practice. Selling similar articles (not just reprints) to different markets is perfectly acceptable.

By BEN FELLER, Associated Press Writer 47 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - President Bush and Cabinet members somberly marked the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks with ceremonies at the White House and the spot where terrorists flew a plane into the Pentagon.

Bush, joined by his wife, the vice president, Cabinet members, White House janitors, kitchen workers and groundskeepers observed a moment of silence at the White House at 8:46 a.m., Tuesday — the exact moment in 2001 when terrorists slammed the first of two jetliners into the World Trade Center in New York.

Across the Potomac River in suburban Virginia, top Defense Department officials held a moment of silence at 9:47 a.m., the moment when the third terrorist plane crashed that day, killing 184.

The president stood with first lady Laura Bush and Dick and Lynne Cheney on the South Lawn of the White House during the simple ceremony that has been repeated each year since the attack.

Bush stood sternly as the Marine band, stationed behind him on the South Portico of the White House, played "God Bless America." Mrs. Bush then took his arm and they walked inside along with the Cheneys. To honor the memories of those killed six years ago, all members of the White House staff were allowed to join in.

Less than an hour later, in a speech to family members of some of the Pentagon victims, Defense Secretary Robert Gates vowed that: "The enemies of America ... will never again rest easy, for we will hunt them down relentlessly and without reservation."

"Here at the Department of Defense, we pay an ongoing tribute with our firm commitment to defend the United States against any and all enemies, wherever they may exist," Gates said.

"And let there be no doubt that anyone wishing to revisit harm upon this country will find in the men and women of this department adversaries who have found clarity of purpose in their grief, a strength of resolve in their anger," he said.

Gates and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, laid a wreathe at the site of the attack, where a building stone charred by the fire that resulted has been engraved with the date and reset into the renovated structure.

Pace referred to the heated debate in the nation over the war in Iraq, saying there is a rightly a dialogue right now over how, where and when to try to defeat those who "on this day six years ago declared war on us."

Since then, 1.5 million service members have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. He called Tuesday "a day of recommitment" by the military to continue defending the nation out of respect for those who lost on Sept. 11 and in the wars since.

"We cannot touch our loved ones today," Pace said, his voice choking with emotion. "Therefore we ask god to hug them for us, that they might know that we love them and we miss them and we'll serve this nation in their honor."

__

Associated Press reporter Pauline Jelinek contributed to this report from Washington.