Without support, financial, organizational and otherwise, the U.S. national IEA writing study would never have been conducted; however, implementation of the study was difficult. Planning for the study and its support commenced in 1980, coterminous with two important occurrences: the National Institute of Education pulled back on its interest in funding research in the area of writing assessment at the Center for the Study of Evaluation (CSE) at UCLA and federal economic policies produced considerable shrinkage in federal and other funds available for research. CSE supported its design and planning phases. Additional support for the design of the international study and test development was provided by the University of Illinois, the International Steering Committee, and the Spencer Foundation. Since CSE already had ongoing writing assessments in a number of states, state funding was sought to continue independent programs, which were to serve as replicates. Although the state support was not found to be fully compliant with IEA requirements, public pressure concerning writing competence and lobbying by educators resulted in a large grant from the MacArthur Foundation for data collection and training for the scoring. Federal and state agencies were helpful in minimizing the data collection costs. Additional federal support was used for scoring and preliminary data analyses. Several factors were concluded to be significant: (1) professionals' commitment; (2) consideration of a variety of funding sources; (3) power of good data; (4) value of collaboration among existing networks; and (5) collaboration with states and local school districts. (GDC)