Grants and Taxes

 I'm a candle burning money at both ends today.

Back in 2019 I can honestly say I lost my mind and I lost a lot of money at the same time. I paid about $1k in taxes and we were awarded about $7or $8k that year total although I'm not sure if I accounted for it correctly in my tax statement.  

Here are the painful details.

I won two mini-grants in 2019, about 5k each, and had applied for three of them at the time.  They were written to support two groups, Wildflowers' Movement and LACCC, Inc.  Both of them are kind of sort of non-profits.  And then there's the CRT, which is a non-profit which I was also supporting.  I've got a lot of groups I'm supporting here.  At the time I was also working as a peer advocate with Didi Hirsch CMHC. And looking back, I was struggling with keeping that job so I don't know why I decided to add another task to my many roles.  

One of the warning signs that something was very wrong was that I lost my cel phone for more than a day, and I couldn't remember my pin for it any longer.  In fact, I had left it at work inside my filing cabinet, and I had paranoid thoughts about that, like someone had stolen it and locked me out of it.  And I was hearing voices during this time as well.  

About three months after the grant ended was when my job at Didi Hirsch finally ended because I could not keep up with my notes, and I was not able to learn the new note system there.  It almost seemed to me as if they had decided to start up a new system just as they saw me struggling, or was that just a coincidence?

We would have received more money but due to a lack of people actually showing up to our event, we asked for less money in the end.  The way the grant worked was that they give you 50% of the funds upfront and then afterwards reimburse you for anything afterwards with your receipts.

This year I'm trying to support the same three or more organizations with writing grants, and I'm hoping to have nothing to do with receiving those grants especially since these grants are 3 times more money than the ones I was originally asking for.  I really really do not like dealing with money if I can help it.