Grant Geek Diva
Dawn Duncan
This post expands upon a post I created a few weeks ago that provided a basic introduction to the structure of the government in the United States based on the three branches of government. In that post, I also talked briefly about how politics and governance are very different things. That’s what I want to talk about in today’s post. For my purposes in using my expertise, knowledge and life experience, I want to talk about governance, not politics. Mostly because, as a grant writer, I’ve had to learn how government agencies work so that I can help my clients access funding from these agencies to support their work in the communities that they serve.
Regardless of the politics, which I realize are a huge part of life in these United States, governance is very important and, in my opinion, has more impact on our day to day lives because it is literally how the government and its departments, programs, policies and decisions are managed and delivered every day. In some ways, most of us are so detached from this reality that we don’t even realize how much it impacts us, but I would wager that if many of the things we take for granted are taken away, we will start noticing at some point. In a way, I think it is an indicator of success that we don’t have to think about these things everyday. It means that many of the goals of government in developing infrastructures around all kinds of functions have succeeded. We take for granted that we have paved roads, modern sanitation, fire departments we can call when our house is on fire, police departments that we can access quickly through 911, public schools that we can send our children to, libraries where we can access books for free, the list goes on and on. Many of us don’t stop and think about these things because they are so built into our daily lives at this point that we take them for granted and we often get mad when they don’t work in the manner we think they should.