One of my favorite posts was one I did covering a grant report made to the University of Wisconsin-Extension, Putting Culture Back into Agriculture.
One of the great things about the report is that it talks about the impact of the Wisconsin Idea on the arts in that state with artists crisscrossing the state helping farmers and townspeople learn how to paint, write plays and learn how to sing together.
I put a number of great quotes in my entry, but one I omitted which seems just as relevant now as it was when UW-Madison President Glenn Frank said it in 1925:
There’s a gap somewhere in the soul of the people that troops into the theater but never produces a folk drama…. The arts are vital, if in the years ahead we are to master instead of being mastered by the vast complex and swiftly moving technical civilization born of science and the machine….
Even if you don’t see your organization as serving a rural community, the reflections by the grantees about what they did wrong in their approach to serving their community, how they rectified it and how things turned out splendidly just the same.
It isn’t often you see this sort of humility in grant reports and it can serve as an example of what to emulate.