By Holly Stuart Hughes

After spending two years documenting the work of hospice volunteers inside the Angola Penitentiary, photographer Lori Waselchuk wanted to show administrators, doctors and guards at other prisons how much prison hospice programs can benefit inmates—both those who volunteer to provide hospice care, and the dying inmates they comfort. In 2008, she applied for and received a distribution grant from the Open Society Institute. She used the grant to turn “Grace Before Dying” into a traveling exhibition that, starting this spring, has been touring prisons in Louisiana and Mississippi.

“I wanted to inspire them to think about end of life care, and about expanding their own hospice programs, or creating new ones,” says Waselchuk, a documentary photographer now based in Philadelphia.

The OSI’s distribution grants require that photographers team with a partner organization to bring a completed photography project to targeted audiences and effect social change. Waselchuk is working with the Louisiana-Mississippi Hospice & Palliative Care Organization to identify prisons where she can display her photos and a collection of quilts sewn by inmates at Angola for use as funeral shrouds.

In preparing her grant application, Waselchuk had to figure out how to create a portable exhibition that could be easily transported, set up and displayed anywhere.     

“I knew I wanted it to be in prison community rooms, cafeterias or gyms,” she says.  “I wanted it to be something flexible so that maybe a prison employee can put it up and take it down.”

Some photographers have selected to display  small prints clipped to wires, or to place mounted prints on easels. In doing her research, Waselchuk considered displays she had seen at trade shows. “Those things look nice, and I knew that people take them with them when they travel.” Researching display frames, she found a system that could be packed into a suitcase. “Ideally, I wanted it to fit in a suitcase that could go in the back of an SUV, and be something  that anyone could carry.”

At first she considered printing the images on fabric, but then, in talking with a printer, she chose a heavy paper stock that could be laminated to protect the images during shipping and handling. “It will be rolled up, and then attached to spider-web frames,” Waselchuk says.
 
All her research into the costs of materials, paper, printing and shipping was reflected in the budget she submitted with her grant application. She received $25,000 from OSI, which represented her full budget.  Within the budget, she says, “I asked for significant money to commission quilters. With this grant money, they [the prison quilters] can now buy new sewing machines. It’s very exciting.”

It’s the first grant Waselchuk has won, though she had been seeking support for “Grace Before Dying” for two years.

Writing grant applications never gets any easier, Waselchuk says, “but it does get easier to get rejected."

Each rejection was educational.  “I learned from every grant that I wrote,” she says. “I write things over and over. The grant writing process is a great way to hone those skills. Every time I had to write a description, every time I submitted it, I rewrote it.”

She believes she succeeded with OSI because the mission of her project was well suited to the Open Society’s mission. In applying for a grant, Waselchuk says, “You always have to put yourself in  [the judges’] shoes and figure out what they want to fund.”  She always researches past winners and grant applications. “The Alexia Foundation publishes past proposals on their web site.”

After winning her first grant, she says, “I’m glad I finally broke through with a very prestigious grant. OSI is a national and international organization and it provides a level of exposure this project would never have gotten."