Grants and Grit did not start with a business plan.

It started on a Friday morning. A position that was there at 8AM and gone by 1PM. A chapter that ended without warning and with it, work I had given everything to.

At the same time, I was walking away from something else. A co-founding I had held onto longer than I should have, for reasons that had more to do with someone else's respect for my work than my own sense of what I was called to do.

So I started over. With twenty-plus years of experience across every layer of this field and nothing else to lose.

The name came first from necessity. I know how to write grants. I have done it. I have won. But I had paid my dues, and I was not interested in doing it anymore. What I was interested in, what I have always been interested in, is changing how philanthropy actually works. Not writing the proposals. Changing the system that requires them.

That is what Grants and Grit became.

Here is what twenty years actually taught us.

The decisions about who gets funded are rarely made the way the process suggests. People in power make choices. Sometimes based on relationships. Sometimes based on who they trust. Sometimes based on who is hooking up their people. The application matters less than most organizations think and more than most funders admit.

We learned that the people who built the wealth now being distributed often built it through risk. And somehow by the time it becomes philanthropy it becomes risk-averse. Cautious. Controlled. The communities carrying the most weight get the most scrutiny and the least flexibility.

We learned that boards rarely reflect the communities foundations exist to serve. That adjacent to wealth is not the same as accountable to community. That a well-written grant can be cut and pasted by a program officer on a deadline for a board that was never going to read it anyway.

And we learned the most important thing. As a trusted colleague puts it: “It’s all made up.”

Which means it can be made differently.

That is why Grants and Grit exists. Not to help organizations play a game that was never designed for them to win. To change who makes the rules and how.

If you have read this far, you already know something is not working. You feel it in your grantee relationships. You feel it in your board meetings. You feel it in the distance between what your institution says it believes and where the dollars actually go.

You are not alone in that.

What we do is translate. Between what organizations know they need and the language funders recognize. Between what philanthropy says it wants to do and what it will actually take to do it. Between the world as it is and the world the sector keeps saying it wants to build.

We also offer something most consulting firms will not name. Atonement. A real reckoning between philanthropy and the field it exists to serve. Not guilt. Not performance. A genuine return to what this work was always supposed to be.

The organizations you fund know exactly what they need. They have always known. What they need is a partner who helps them speak plainly, listen honestly, and move resources in ways that reflect what they actually heard.

We help you get there.

Not to fix philanthropy. To ignite it.