Community Organizations Editing and Proofreading Services

Nobody at the community center is paid to read the funding application before it goes. The volunteer who wrote it also unlocked the hall that morning, chased the plumber, and has until Friday. Across town, a competing application is being written by a salaried fundraiser at an organization twenty times the size. The work on the ground is often the better of the two. The document rarely is, and a funder can only read the document.

The documents we edit for Community Organizations

Constitutions and governing documents come to us from residents' associations, tenants' groups, and neighborhood bodies. Funding applications arrive in the same week as the reports back to funders and members. We also edit annual meeting papers and minutes, membership and volunteer recruitment material, newsletters and bulletin board wording, and consultation responses to city government and developers. Petitions on local issues, room rental agreements, child protection and safety policies, partnership agreements with public bodies, and community survey questions reach us as well. Our editors work at the scale you actually operate at, and we do not recommend a process that assumes staff you do not have.

What the editing involves

The claim to speak for a community carries more weight than anything else a group writes, and it is the easiest sentence to knock down. A funder who reads that a group represents 1,200 households will ask who elected the committee, how many members it has, and how those members were consulted. A group that cannot answer loses the argument, whether or not it was right. The remedy is not a stronger adjective. It is a smaller, checkable claim.

Stated at the strength it can bear, the claim reads better than the vague version. The group does not speak for the area; it has 140 members across the housing development, 62 people attended the meeting where this position was agreed, and the survey behind the position drew 310 responses from roughly 900 households. Numbers like those are hard to argue with, and usually more impressive than the sentence they replace. Where a group does not know how representative it is, writing down what it does know protects it better than a claim one question can puncture.

The same discipline applies to a report back to a funder. A grant of $8,000 that paid for 40 sessions attended by 210 people, with 12 volunteers giving about 600 hours between them, is a report. A paragraph saying the project was a great success is a claim the funder cannot bank.

Confidentiality and the limits of our role

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including membership lists, funding applications, and correspondence. We are editors, not legal, governance, or funding advisors, and we offer no opinion on your constitution, your charitable status, or any planning or licensing matter. What we can do is make the writing clear and the claims solid, and we are used to working with volunteers doing this around everything else.