The Dorothy A. Johnson Collection on Philanthropy & Nonprofit Leadership is one of the most comprehensive collections in the country in the areas of philanthropy, volunteerism, youth philanthropy, service learning, and nonprofit management. It includes all materials purchased with funds endowed by the Council of Michigan Foundations (CMF) since July 2000, and contains many items formerly held in the CMF library, which dates back to 1972. The Johnson Collection is an affiliate of the Consortium of Foundation Libraries. The digital collection is available here. 

Look here for philanthropy and nonprofit databases, grant sources, as well as resources helpful for writing grant proposals.

Articles can be used for the needs/problem statement section of your grant proposal to present compelling evidence about your cause.  Good, authoritative evidence can help convince a funder that there's a problem that needs to be solved with their grant.

Databases allow you to look for articles. Databases usually have citations (information about an article such as the title, author, name of the journal or magazine the article appeared in, volume and issue, date, and pages) and sometimes they will also contain an abstract, or summary, of the article.

Databases also often have information about other types of resources - books, essays or chapters, government documents, etc.

Some databases will also have the articles themselves (the full text of the article). When that happens, you will see a link to an HTML or PDF document. If you do not see a link, click on "Get it at GVSU" - this will check the other library databases for the full text of the article.

Use the catalog and keywords and/or subject terms to find books on grant-writing and your topic.  There are many ways to do that. Try, for example, doing an advanced search for your topic and the subject term "endowments -- united states -- directories". Or, use keywords like grant-writing or fundraising with your topic.