FundedShe turned our messy logic model into a $1.2M award from NIH. I handed her a draft that read like a budget meeting and got back something that read like it deserved to be funded.
Dr. Renata Osei-Mensah
Executive Director, Bridgewater Community Health Alliance
What to look for in a grant writer
A great grant writer rewrites your logic model before touching the narrative.
Federal health funders — NIH, HRSA, CDC — read hundreds of proposals from teams with solid science. What separates winners is whether the logic model and the narrative tell the same coherent story. If the aims don't map cleanly to the evaluation plan, reviewers notice. The best grant writers diagnose that structural problem first.
I had six weeks and a logic model that made no sense. She rebuilt the whole theory of change, wrote the specific aims in two days, and we got the score we needed. Funded on first submission.
Marcus Webb, MPH
Executive Director, Eastside Wellness Collective
We'd been rejected twice by RWJF. She read both reviews, identified the narrative gap in 20 minutes, and the third submission won. I wish I'd hired her for the first two.
Priya Anand
Development Director, Millbrook Maternal Health Initiative
She writes like she's been inside a federal review panel. Every section anticipates the reviewer's next question before they ask it.
Dr. James Okafor
Chief Medical Officer, Northgate Community Clinic
What to look for in a grant writer
Foundation grants are won in the first two paragraphs — or not at all.
Program officers at Kresge, NEA, and similar foundations read the opening of every proposal before they read anything else. If the problem statement doesn't make them feel the urgency within the first 200 words, the rest of the narrative is fighting uphill. The opening has to earn the rest of the read.
She translated what we do — community arts residencies in rural counties — into language that made Kresge's program officers actually call us before the decision. That's never happened before.
Theodora Vasquez
Executive Director, High Plains Arts Collaborative
Our university had never won an NEA grant at this scale. She understood the review criteria better than our internal development team and wrote the narrative to match them exactly.
Prof. Daniel Reyes
Associate Dean of Research, Harmon State University
What to look for in a grant writer
SBIR reviewers are scientists. They know when a founder is guessing.
Phase I SBIR proposals are evaluated by panels of active researchers. Vague commercialization plans and generic significance statements fail immediately. The narrative has to demonstrate scientific rigor and commercial plausibility in the same breath — which requires a writer who has read enough successful Phase I awards to know what the bar actually looks like.
I knew nothing about SBIR when I found her. She explained the entire mechanism, rewrote my significance section from scratch, and we got a fundable score on the first submission. $300K we wouldn't have known to apply for.
Aisha Kamara
Founder & CEO, NovaBioSense
She caught a fatal flaw in our innovation section that would have killed the score. Fixed it in 48 hours. The proposal read like it came from someone who'd been through ten review cycles.
Kevin Tran
CTO & Co-Founder, Luminary Health Tech
We were a hardware startup with zero grant experience. She took our pitch deck, turned it into a Phase I application, and walked us through the entire submission process. Funded. No revisions requested.
Sofia Nakamura
CEO, Fieldwork Robotics
Transparency
The numbers are on the table.
Most grant writers won't show you this. Here's the actual record — by funder, by program, by dollar amount awarded.
Funder / Program
Submitted
Win Rate
Total Awarded
NIH (R-series)
14
64%
$8.4M
NSF (SBIR/STTR)
11
64%
$3.1M
HRSA
8
75%
$4.2M
Kresge Foundation
5
80%
$2.8M
NEA
7
71%
$890K
USDA (rural health)
4
100%
$1.6M
RWJF
3
67%
$1.9M
All Programs
52
71%
$22.9M
Download the full win rate sheet.
One page. Every funder. Every program. The numbers that make the case before you even get on a call.
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