Grant Writer, County of Fulton, Ohio

My name is Genna Biddix. I work for Fulton County as a grant writer. Basically what I do for them as a grant writer is to try to find funding for the different projects that the county has on tap, whether it be for the different elected officials across the county, or the different department heads. Those projects include anything from public infrastructure, to recreation, community facilities, community programming, law enforcement, all sorts of things. My biggest responsibility is to give guidance to other public entities that might need assistance with grant writing. It's very complicated and complex and there's a lot of rules that come along with it because all of those dollars are federally regulated, or regulated by the state. So the administration of those dollars is extremely important, and if you do not handle that properly the government will ask you for their money back. And most of the time that doesn't happen, but if you're not careful with what you're doing it can. One of the biggest accomplishments in my career so far was I wrote a grant under Governor DeWine's H2Ohio program, and we were awarded the largest dollar amount in the entire state, and he visited us to make that announcement. We got $10 million to completely, entirely replace the water distribution system in the village of Fayette that is failing and needs entirely replaced. I don't do tons of travel, but in the general, maybe five county region, I do quite a lot. I'm in the Toledo area quite a bit for different things, trainings, meetings, things like that, to meet with other government entities. But otherwise, my hours are pretty reasonable. Early, early on in my career I probably worked 60, 70 hours a week. Now I work 40.