Grant Writing Is Infrastructure

(Illustration by Hanna Barczyk) 

During a site visit to a nonprofit, one of us witnessed an executive director frantically calling a staff member whose father had just suffered a heart attack. The staff member was at the hospital—and happened to be the only person who knew the organization’s grant portal password, with the deadline hours away. Elsewhere, one of us was asked to advise on a federal grant application—written by individuals with no experience in federal grants—and due in two days’ time.

Meanwhile, we’ve each heard funders say, “We’re not seeing enough strong proposals” or “We want to fund more grassroots work, but the applications aren’t competitive.” These statements are meant to be diagnostic, but they miss the deeper issue. After nearly two decades each in the nonprofit sector, we have come to recognize these episodes as symptomatic of a more fundamental structural problem: the failure to invest in grant writing as nonprofit infrastructure.

This conversation is especially urgent now, as the Trump administration continues to make sweeping changes to federal grantmaking—and major philanthropies quietly reposition themselves in response. Between federal grants and private grant makers, around $1.5 trillion is transferred through grants annually.

Despite sector rhetoric about innovation, scale, and impact, none of these objectives materialize without skilled professionals—often working in isolation, under-resourced, and facing compressed timelines—who translate organizational vision into competitive funding applications. This translation process, while frequently invisible, is essential to nonprofit sustainability. It’s mindboggling that the grant economy has grown this large—and this critical—with ad hoc processes and rushed procedures, and managed by people for whom it’s a secondary responsibility.

Grant writing is skilled knowledge work that for many organizations accesses a quarter to more than half of their operating budget. Like roads, bridges, and broadband, it requires deliberate investment, systematic maintenance, and long-term planning. When organizations have the infrastructure to support it, proposals become stronger, funding becomes more reliable, and impact becomes more equitable. When we fail to invest, we entrench a system where we privilege bureaucratic competence over community engagement.

The Professionalization of Grantmaking

As charitable giving has evolved into philanthropic investment, grant writing has undergone fundamental transformation. A generation ago, most nonprofits relied on development generalists who handled grant writing alongside broader fundraising responsibilities—often writing to local funders they knew personally, pitching projects based on relationships and shared values.

Federal expansion of grantmaking introduced systematic approaches to forms, procedures, and compliance requirements. Private foundations began adopting similar frameworks, implementing parallel expectations and requirements. What originated as a public accountability mechanism became sector-wide orthodoxy.

Today’s grant writing requires not just storytelling, but fluency in finance, evaluation, policy, and competitive strategy. Yet, most nonprofits operate with minimal or no dedicated grant staff. These sophisticated knowledge requirements are simply assigned to existing staff—program directors, development managers, or executive leaders—who already manage critical responsibilities in their primary functional areas. Unsurprisingly, this overburdening leads to burnout. Development staff turnover in nonprofits, where grant writing is often housed, averages around 16–18 months.

Even organizations seeking to hire dedicated grant writers face significant challenges. Remarkably, no national or state standards define qualified grant-writing competency. Most grant writers learn through direct practice—writing proposals, experiencing success or failure, and incrementally building competency. The Grant Professionals Association offers retrospective credentialing based on prior grant wins and accumulated experience. We credential survivors while failing to develop systematic entry pathways.

Together, we bring nearly 40 years of on-the-ground experience in grant writing across both large institutions and small grassroots organizations. Again and again, the obstacle we find isn’t mission or program capacity—it’s infrastructure. The real barrier lies in the processes, tools, workflows, and people that allow organizations to reliably turn vision into proposals, proposals into funding, and funding into change.

According to “The 2023 State of Grantseeking Report” from GrantStation, 68 percent of organizations identify time requirements as their primary grant-seeking challenge. Preparing individual proposals requires between two days and four weeks—time not allocated to direct mission delivery. And that doesn’t include reporting requirements.

These dynamics disproportionately impact grassroots organizations and those serving marginalized communities. Research from Echoing Green and The Bridgespan Group demonstrates that organizations led by those who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color receive 24 percent less philanthropic funding than white-led organizations of comparable size and scope. While multiple factors contribute to this disparity, limited access to grant-seeking infrastructure is a driver.

But this isn’t simply a nonprofit choice—it’s a system shaped by funders. When grant makers define infrastructure as “overhead” and underwrite only direct services, they effectively tell nonprofits to patch together proposals with whatever capacity remains. Leaders feeding families or housing the homeless then face a choice: spend money they don’t have on infrastructure that funders won’t support or stretch every dollar toward immediate needs. The result is predictable: duct-taped chairs, outdated technology, and makeshift grant processes that persist year after year.

In this way, funders inadvertently drive the cycle of underinvestment. By rewarding visible outputs and neglecting the systems behind them, they ensure that the organizations most committed to service remain least able to scale it. What feels like noble sacrifice for nonprofits becomes, in practice, a structural barrier created by funding norms themselves.

A Framework for Systematic Change

Addressing these challenges requires coordinated action across the funding ecosystem, beginning with funders’ recognition of their role in creating unintentional barriers to access. Even if funders are reluctant to invest in nonprofit systems that ultimately sustain their own grantmaking, they can begin by reducing unnecessary burden.

Funders must distinguish between intentional and unintentional friction. Intentional friction—strategic questions, relevant documentation, meaningful metrics—helps identify genuine alignment between funder and nonprofit. Unintentional friction, however, piles up through duplicative forms, redundant uploads, and clunky portals that devour nonprofit time without producing information that improves funding decisions.

One of the most common frustrations our team encounters is being asked to upload a full board list—and then manually reenter each member’s name, title, term dates, and demographic details into individual fields. It’s 20 to 30 minutes per application. Multiply that by 40 applications annually, and you’ve burned half of a workweek on copy and paste. The time that nonprofits have is a finite resource, and we waste it.

Similarly, many funders require budget and outcomes conversion into foundation-specific templates, prioritizing reviewer convenience over sector capacity. What saves funders minutes of review time costs hundreds of nonprofit hours of reformatting, which they have to repeat for the next funder and the next.

At GrantFlow, we’ve developed an internal complexity score to evaluate application burden. After scoring hundreds of applications, we found little correlation between grant complexity and award size. Grants for $2 million can require one-20th the effort of grants for $2,500. This may surprise funders but will not surprise nonprofits.

Anyone who’s worked in nonprofit development has seen organizations twist themselves into knots trying to fit their successful existing work into whatever new framework a major funder just announced. Grant writing frequently happens in crisis mode—rushed, reactive, and cobbled together under pressure. But the best proposals aren’t the product of last-minute genius. They’re the result of preparation and structure.

Organizations also too often focus on each grant as an individual tree, rather than seeing the forest of interconnected opportunities that share common requirements. That means creating repeatable systems and building in continuity—so the function survives staff turnover.

This infrastructure includes regular planning meetings, shared deadline ownership, and professional development that maintains staff awareness of funder priorities, evaluation methodologies, and policy developments. It requires collaborative workflows engaging program and finance staff as strategy coauthors rather than last-minute reviewers. When systems function well, grant writing stops being a scramble for resources and becomes part of an organization’s strategic rhythm—repeatable, teachable, and resilient.

The paradox is that while this infrastructure is straightforward, it exists in a funding blind spot. Nonprofits can’t afford the time and money to build it themselves, and grantmaking orthodoxy treats it as “overhead” to be minimized—rendering invisible the very systems that provide an enormous share of nonprofit revenue.

Right now, much of our nation’s social infrastructure is held together by work-arounds. Underpaid, undertrained staff are asked to manage grant development on top of other responsibilities, as though complex, high-stakes funding applications that can be the difference between existing and not should be a part-time task. This fiction is not just inefficient—it is inequitable.

This dynamic particularly affects community-rooted, equity-driven organizations that are deeply responsive to local needs. These organizations often possess abundant passion and programmatic innovation but lack the capacity infrastructure necessary to compete effectively for funding. The skills that enable leaders to convene communities, build trust, and mobilize grassroots action aren’t the same skills required to navigate complex application portals and compliance frameworks. Unless we address this reality systematically, the sector will continue underinvesting in its most transformative agents of change.

Treating grant writing as infrastructure rather than overhead requires investment in people, processes, and systems. If we genuinely seek to resource grassroots, community-led, and systems-disrupting organizations, we must invest in the capacity that enables them to access funding in the first place.

Read more stories by Matt Leighty & Emily Joseph.