Giselle Jones-Jones shares her wisdom on engaging board members in fund sourcing.
Here's the Transcript
Russell Dennis: Welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange brought to you by SynerVision Leadership Foundation. I am your host, Russell Dennis. Thank you for joining us. Our guest today is Dr. A Giselle Jones. She is the founder of The Write Source, technical writing and consultation services. She is a writing advocate for community leaders, pastors, administrators, and the like, all sorts of nonprofit entities. She is here to share her expertise with us today. Thank you, Giselle. Welcome. Glad to have you here.
Giselle Jones-Jones: I am glad to be here.
Russell: All right. So Giselle, tell us a little bit more about the woman underneath the cloak.
Giselle: I see myself standing like Wonder Woman with my cape flying in the wind.
Russell: Tell us about your superpowers here.
Giselle: I’ll tell ya, I am empowered by the people whom I have had the privilege to write for and to work for. They are really the wind beneath my wings. I can’t claim any of the success on my own. It’s because I have been in the right place and been equipped to be the right person for these people. I like the way you emphasize The Write Source before because that is exactly what I do. The w-r-i-t-e. I do the writing. We’ll talk a little bit more about that in just a little bit.
But the woman underneath the cloak, the woman wearing the mask, the woman who is in the background. Again, my name is Giselle Jones-Jones. I am a Jones twice. I married a Jones. I have ben writing now, filling the majority of my professional life, and how I demonstrate that in my day job, so to speak, is as a teacher. I am a professor of English, of literature, public speaking, so that is my day job, and that is what gives me my passion. My students give me my passion. I do that and have been doing it since 1990. That tells my age, Lord have mercy. But I have been doing that for many years, and I learned my greatest lesson. I once heard that the teacher is twice taught. Again, I look at everything really as a privilege, and I take everything that I do as building blocks to do the next thing. Teaching, that gives me what I need to do what I do in my evening job, in my weekend job, in the-extra-time-that-I-have job, which is working for the nonprofit, which is working for the charity or the ministry or the professionals who have a desire in their hearts to do something to make a change in their community.
Where I come in is exactly how I see my students. My students on the first day of English 101: Composition, “I hate to write. I don’t want to do it.” I have to struggle with them throughout the semester. On the other end of it, they are happy for the journey. But it’s the same thing with the charities, with nonprofits. There is this fear, there is this force that is in the air, and they absolutely fear the writing process. Preparing that proposal just causes dread and so they have a desire to do something in the community. They want to do something great, but they often stop in their tracks. When they face that in order to write a grant, it needs to read well, etc, they come looking for the grant writer, that person, and that has been me for organizations again who I have been privileged to work with as a freelance writer.
I created The Write Source to cover me as the freelance grant writer, and that is how I have operated over the course of these 20+ years that I have been The Write Source. Meeting Hugh on August 26—that was just a little over two weeks ago—founder and president of SynerVision, opened my eyes to the possibilities that I was working out this summer and building of the infrastructure of my company to duplicate myself a few more times so that I can reach more people and help more people. Again, this opportunity today is a blessing. The past two weeks dealing with Hugh, I have been on a rollercoaster ride already. It’s been fantastic because it’s putting me in a place of impa