This Saturday, July 18, is my birthday and last month was my 5-year business anniversary (what?! how?!), so I’m feeling reflective.

Years ago, I thought 5 years in business would be a milestone that I would celebrate, but last month it just did not feel right to do so.

I’m not going to do a self-laudatory post here about what I’ve accomplished in the past 5 years because I feel there’s too much I haven’t done, haven’t understood about what needs to be done.

Instead I want to set my intentions for this business here.

In the next year, I want to:

·       Listen to what you need and figure out how I can better meet those needs in everything I do.

·       Give more freely of my knowledge, meaning create more free trainings and content that will serve you.

·       Collaborate more with other grant writing experts and nonprofit leaders and consultants from around the country and world, specifically with women and BIPOC.

·       Create more jobs for other people, again, especially women and BIPOC.

·       All of this intersects with my family life, which is more time-consuming than ever with a 10-month-old baby. That means I need to scale back on the less important tasks that just take too much time and don’t give enough benefit to you all.

So much of this perspective is coming from what we’ve all been dealing with since March. The world has changed rapidly in the last few months, but still not rapidly enough. The pandemic has forced us to face systemic problems we have thus far refused to face as an individualistic nation. And we can’t wait for solutions to be handed to us from above, we have to create them ourselves.

We need economic equality. We need radical racial and gender justice. We need free comprehensive healthcare for everyone not only because it’s morally right but because it will benefit all of us, as we’ve seen with the pandemic. We need environmental justice (Goodbye DAPL!). We need humane immigration policy. We need to end sexual assault and remove rapists in power. We need to end human trafficking, homelessness, hunger, and I could go on and on.

The philanthropic world is scrambling to stay relevant as nonprofits have fewer time and resources to apply for grants and fundraise. So many of their practices are gatekeeping—meant to keep the same old, multi-million-dollar budget, large, white-led nonprofits receiving funding, the same people in power, the same people out of power. That’s why I started this business; I was sick of seeing the small nonprofits be underfunded out of existence. I’m still trying to figure out what I can do to truly democratize grant funding.

All of this leaves me with a question that I don’t feel I can answer in detail: Where are am I going with this business in the next five years?

All I know right now is that I want to go towards more love, more giving, more justice, more of my own personal discomfort, and more willingness to put others first. I know that you will help me, help all of us, figure out what that looks like.

If you would like to make a $10 donation to our Pay It Forward program, which provides underfunded nonprofits lifetime access to Grant Writing Made Easy, you can do that here.

I’ll be matching all donations throughout the month of July and August.

Contribute to the Pay It Forward program.

As always, thank you for being part of this community. It’s an honor.