For rural community organisations, and for the people building agricultural technology.
The groups who most need grant funding are usually the least resourced to go after it — a committee of volunteers, a deadline, a portal, and nobody with the time to sit down and explain properly what this would mean. Let us tell your story the way it deserves to be told.
Tell us what you're going forMy family milks 3,700 head in Wisconsin. My father wanted to build an anaerobic digester — capture the methane coming off the effluent and turn it into electricity. At that time there was nothing like it at that scale on a dairy anywhere in the country. There was also no money for it.
So I learned how to ask. Then I did it again, and again — three rounds, $250,000 each.
What got built became one of the first large-scale dairy digesters in the United States. It didn't just run the farm. It put electricity into the three towns around us.
I've been writing grants ever since.
Plenty of sound engineering never gets funded. It got funded because somebody sat down and explained what it would actually mean — for the farm, for the water, and for a few hundred people who had no idea their lights were about to run on cow manure.
A grant application isn't a form. It's the one chance you get to make somebody who has never stood in your paddock care about what happens in it.
That's the part most applications get wrong. They describe the project. They don't make anyone care about it.
I've had a passion for seeing agricultural technology actually realised in the world since I was young — since I was fifteen and standing in a dairy yard, in fact. Good ideas in agriculture die for want of funding all the time. Writing the application is the cheapest part of stopping that from happening.
A commission pays us to overpromise on your behalf — to stretch the numbers, widen the claims and write cheques your project has to cash three years later, because I only get paid if you win. Funders have read thousands of applications and they can hear it. In the United States it's worse than a bad look: percentage-based compensation breaches the Grant Professionals Association code of ethics, and federal award funds can't be used to pay contingent fees at all. So we charge a flat fee, we get paid the same whether it lands or not, and the only thing we're protecting is whether the application is true.
Tell us what you're going forCountry committees lose whole months to applications that were never going to get up. We'd rather spend twenty minutes telling you that for nothing than take a fee for writing it anyway. Sometimes the answer is a different program, a different year, or a smaller ask.
Not a refund — a rewrite. Funding rounds come back around, assessors change, and a near miss reworked against the feedback is often the strongest application in the next intake. We'd rather stay with you until the money lands.
I've never written a grant that wasn't funded. I intend to keep it that way, which is exactly why I'll talk you out of the ones that can't be.
The program, the closing date, and a few lines about what you want to do. Rough is fine.
Within a day, and it costs you nothing. If it can't, we'll say why and point you at what might.
Usually one conversation. We need to understand what you're actually trying to build and who it changes things for.
The application, the budget narrative, and the supporting text — ready for you to read, question and submit.
I wrote the Agricultural Bureau of South Australia's application to the Strong and Resilient Communities program, administered by Volunteering SA & NT. It funded Steph Schmidt's Navigate Together wellbeing workshops at Arthurton, Orroroo and Lameroo — delivered through the drought, in rooms full of people who needed them, in towns that could never have paid for them.
Small money, by the standards of the digester. It is not small if you were in one of those rooms.
In the interest of being straight with you: I sit on that organisation's state board, and I wasn't paid for that application. I mention it because you'd rather hear it from me than find it out later.
A few lines is plenty. We'll tell you honestly whether we think it can win — and if we don't, we'll say so before you've spent anything.