• Change Your Life by Illuminating Others! 

• A Workbook for Visionaries-in-Training! 

• A Journaling Experience for Personal and Professional Change! 

• Experience Self-Renewal!

• Inspire Others!

2015 - Dr. Beverly Browning has been a shining light for me in this profession. Her book, Grant Writing for Dummies helped me write and get my first grant. Her book How to Become a Grant Writing Consultant helped me set up my own business as a grant professional. At the 2012 GPA Conference in Indianapolis, I attended one of her workshops, and loved being in her “wise woman” presence.

This year, I attended Part One of her new program Be the Shining Light – a motivational program that helped me professionally and personally. Her pieces of wisdom that resonated with me:

• Hard times last a season, and prepare you for something else to come. Don’t take away the significance of devastating times – you learn from them and they will be used. Dr. Bev shared her background of being born to dysfunctional parents, raised by aging grandparents, helping to raise a brother 13 years younger, streetwise by age 14, losing infant sons when she was 15 and 33 and being an academic failure by choice until 11^th grade.
• While many barriers and challenges made her childhood and teen years very difficult, she sites many blessings and “earth angels” who helped her along the way. She found role models in an aunt, uncle, cousins, neighbors, grant professionals and friends. She married at 18 to a man who supported who goals and dreams, and they’ve been married 49 years. She started college part-time at age 20 and finished 20 years later. Her daughter has two post-graduate degrees and she takes joy in being a grandmother. She’s a 41-time author – including five editions of the Dummies book.

What sparked Be the Shining Light?

• “Positive feedback from others, let me know I was here for a purpose,” she said; “Colleagues, students, mentors, family, friends, clients and others have helped to shape me.”
• The program provides a platform to show that you can overcome multiple barriers to achieve your professional dreams and to Be a Shining Light for others. If it’s in you to do it, you will! Her story and insights apply to any profession – not just grant writers.

How is your light shining?

• If we keep it (the light) to ourselves, it withers. If you share it, it grows.
• Everything leads to where you are today. Use it.
• By using the gift in you, you will be a shining light for others. As grant professionals we can help whole communities.
• Are we brilliant and inviting? Approachable? Sharing our successes and our failures?

Part Two of the program examines how to be the shining light in your daily life, assessing your strengths and weaknesses and what to do with the findings. A book is forthcoming and I look forward reading it.