American Grant Writers Association- John Porter Local Non-profit loses money over services not provided Largo Florida

Our small non-profit organization was presented the opportunity to apply for a large scale departement of education grant that would better help us acheive our mission. Our mission is to inspire and enable all young people, especially those who need us most, to reach their full potential as productivem, caring, and responsible citizens. The funds from this grant would help us expand our services into more shcools in our community. With a grant of this size, we decided that we would hire a professional grant writer to strengthen our chance of receiveing the grant. We found John Porter on the American Grant Writers Association website (AGWA). We sent him an email explaining that we were working under strict deadlines to submit a federal grant and asked if he had experience and availability to help us write a winning grant. He called our offices immediately and expressed that he was equiped to help us. He said he is a full-time grant writer which meant that he would spend all of his working time working on this grant until it was completed. He sent a resume that listed he had written work for the Boys and Girls Club in the past so we decided to sign an agreement with him. In the agreement, it clearly stated that he would provide the service of "researching and completeting one application for a federal grant (education grant) to fund client's program." We mailed him a check for $2000 to receive these services. We sent him information about our organization and wrote rough drafts for the grant narratives per John Porter's request. All "edited" materials he sent were full of spelling and gramatical errors and did not make sense with the grant requirements. A vast amount of information was not provided and when asked to provide more information, he was incredibly unproffesional in his reponse, or he did not respond at all. Our organization ended up having to send the grant out to an editor to be acceptable to send in as the final product. It would be appropriate and ethical for AGWA to provide our organization with a partial refund for providing poor and insufficient services. We hope that other organizations, especially those in youth services, do not fall into the same trap with AGWA.