Quick Tips
When Your Grant Competitor Is Also Your Partner
One of the hardest calls in federal funding happens when you realize another organization in your community is also applying for the same opportunity.
Here is the situation. A capable nonprofit is preparing a strong federal application. A longtime community partner currently holds a similar grant and also plans to pursue the funding opportunity. If your organization decides to pursue the opportunity, the two organizations become direct competitors with overlapping geographic impact: they will both be proposing to serve the same community.
If your organization steps back, a real community need goes unmet (the whole reason you were pursuing the funding opportunity in the first place!). But if you pursue it and win, you worry your partner might feel like you “stole their grant.”
Your relationships, your mission, the potential impact, and the funding are all on the table at once. And you have to make a decision fast, because the funding opportunity closes in four weeks.
It is worth slowing down, because the instinct to soften the conflict usually makes it worse.
What Empowerment Language Hides in Your Narrative
I recently read a post on LinkedIn about “empowerment” language, and it really got me thinking! Language is a living, breathing part of our work, and it changes constantly. When I first started grant writing more than a decade ago (now closer to two decades than one!), “empowerment” language was just entering grant writing, and it was considered fairly progressive. The idea at the time was that we were moving away from the nonprofit being the one doing the work to make the change to providing support to a community so they could make the change.
More recent critiques of empowerment language argue that it often overlooks what is already present in communities and still gives the organization disproportionate credit for the work that happens.
There is a sentence that lives in nearly every grant proposal I have ever read, and in plenty I have written myself: "Our organization empowers [women] to [build financial independence]." Insert your variable between the brackets. It reads as warm, mission-driven. It has done its job in thousands of funded applications. I want to slow down on it, because that sentence carries an assumption about who matters most in the work.
Empowerment language has become the sector's default vocabulary. It signals values. It tells a funder you care. It also, in the same breath, places your organization at the center of the story and the community you serve at the receiving end of your generosity. That arrangement is worth examining, especially for those of us who care about equity and want our grant narratives to reflect it.
AI Tools That Are Changing the Game for Grant Writers
AI, when used well, can actually expand your power as a grant writer and equip you with tools that give you a head start, offer clarity, and free up your brain for the strategic decisions only you can make. In this Quick Tips post, I introduce you to three CustomGPTs—field-tested assistants I’ve built for the reality of small, capacity-strapped nonprofits who are doing this work without a full grant team.