The funding landscape is rough.We brought sensible shoes.
Grant strategy, proposals, systems, and evaluation for nonprofits and educational institutions. Everything we build, you keep.
Anyone can generate a proposal now. Funders can tell.
Grant applications have surged by more than 50 percent with the arrival of generative AI. Nearly everything now clears the bar for basic quality. A fluent draft is cheap, and so is everyone else's.
What AI can't supply is coherence or direction: activities aligned with outcomes, budgets that match, and a pipeline that serves your overarching strategy. It also can't dig into funders' giving histories, make a warm phone call, or read where priorities are heading. It has never been rejected by a funder, and it shows.
AK & Co operates as your grants department: strategy, pipeline, proposals, reporting, and evaluation in one place. Every proposal meets the same standard: if the logic wouldn't survive an evaluator, it won't survive review. Conveniently, we keep one in-house. The two departments share a desk.
National Science Foundation·W.K. Kellogg Foundation·Bloomberg Philanthropies·Open Society Foundations·U.S. Department of Education·U.S. Department of Labor·European Union·Dollar General Literacy Foundation·Delta Dental Foundation·The Coca-Cola Foundation
Which one sounds like you?
Two paths. Each has a defined scope, a visible process, a fixed investment, and an end. You leave with the strategy and systems to keep going, with or without us.
“Our programs deserve funding. We just don't have a grants operation.”
No prospect list, no boilerplate, no calendar. Grants happen when someone finds time, which is never. The Funding Foundation builds the machinery once, properly, and hands it to you.
The Funding Foundation → No. 2“We apply for grants. We need someone senior actually running it.”
Deadlines slip, reports pile up, and nobody owns strategy. A full-time hire is out of reach. A Fractional Grants Manager puts a senior professional on your entire grants function, month to month.
Fractional Grants Manager →We build it. You keep it.
Every engagement ends with a clean handoff: the research, the narratives, the calendar, the systems, and the training to run them. Capacity that stays with the consultant was never really yours.
Start with a conversation