The Luxury of Time

Somewhere right now, someone is sitting in front of a funder’s form at eleven at night. They know exactly what their community needs — they’ve known for years, they live there. But the form wants a theory of change, an evaluation framework and a sustainability plan, written in polished English that isn’t their first language, and they have to be at the site at seven. So they close the laptop. Thirty grants they qualify for go unapplied-to this year, and the money goes somewhere else.

That’s the problem. Not talent. Not merit. Paperwork.

I’ve watched it from both sides

I’ve spent years on the deciding side — first at United Way Mumbai, then at the Salesforce Foundation. Reading applications. Helping choose who got funded.

I’ve been on the other side of it too. I trained as a social worker and started at the grassroots. In Singapore I was the entire fundraising department — one person, ten at night.

The money doesn’t go to the best organizations. It goes to the ones with time and money to spare.

Nobody talks about the language

Here’s the barrier I almost never see named.

The form is in English. Not just English — a very particular dialect of it. Capacity-building. Measurable outcomes framework. Sustainability plan.

For an enormous number of people on this planet, English is a second language. Or a third. Or a fourth.

And even in the US and Canada, the numbers are bigger than most people assume. Nearly 68 million people in the United States — about one in five — speak a language other than English at home. In Canada, 4.6 million people, 12.7% of the population, mainly speak a non-official language at home.

Those are the communities that most need the funding. They’re also the ones being asked to compete in a second language.

A proposal written in imperfect English gets read as an imperfect program.

So the form isn’t asking whether your work is good. It’s asking whether you can perform fluency in English.

And they hate the process — rightly

The executive directors I talk to have grant PTSD. That’s not a joke I’m making at their expense — it’s the phrase that keeps coming back to me from those calls. Dread, avoidance, a form nobody wants to open.

Brilliant ideas, held up by a process the person with the idea despises and was never trained for.

Why we built GrantOrb

We started building AI for grant writing before the category had a name. Saying those two things in one sentence used to get you a raised eyebrow at a nonprofit conference. Now it’s an industry.

So here is what we set out to do:

We will build a grant writer for every organization doing the work.

Simple enough that the one person running the programs can use it between meetings. In your own words, not in a dialect you had to be taught. And priced so low that no organization ever again rations itself to three applications a year.

Because if you’re doing the work, you’re fundable.

That last line is the whole company. Not if you write well. Not if you have a development department, or a graduate degree, or flawless English. If you’re doing the work.

GrantOrb takes the cost of applying to near zero. The grants come to you. The proposals write themselves in the background. Nobody has to leave the work to go get the funding.

Everybody gets the same shot — and then let the best work win.

How we actually work

We want our customers to succeed. Period. We want to help you unlock unimaginable amounts of money for your cause — thousands of grants — and we’ll do whatever it takes to get you there. I spend mornings getting customers over the finish line. I volunteer to do things for them that aren’t my job. I sit in the messy parts with them.

Stupid simple by design. The human on the other side of this is already overloaded — information overload, decision overload, a hundred systems asking for attention. Decision fatigue is the enemy. So we cut buttons. We remove steps. We stop asking you the same question twice. No prompting, no wrestling with a chatbot. Describe your project like you’d explain it to a friend, and get something finished back.

Remove all friction for changemakers. That’s the whole brief. Every feature has to answer to it or it doesn’t ship.

We build from real conversations, not from a whiteboard. Every insight in this product came from a call with someone doing the actual work. Talking to customers is the best part of this job.

Priced so you never hesitate. This is the one I care about most. Affordability isn’t a discount we hand out when someone asks — it’s the constraint we design backward from, starting with a number the smallest organization in the smallest town can actually pay.

Because the moment the price makes you stop and think is this one worth going after? — you’re rationing yourself again. You’ll skip the long shot. You’ll skip the small grant. You’ll skip the funder you’re not sure about.

Nobody should ever hesitate to fundraise because of what it costs to try.

The oldest lesson

There’s a line from the Gita I keep returning to. Karmanye vadhikaraste, ma phaleshu kadachana. You have a right to the action. Never to its fruits.

At the World Toilet Organization I won four grants out of five. For years I told that as a success story.

It isn’t one. The real lesson is that I should have applied to a hundred.

Rationing yourself is attachment to the fruit. It’s deciding in advance which ones you’ll lose and calling that realism. Nearly every organization I’ve worked with does it, and it’s the most expensive habit in this sector — not because the odds are bad, but because the applications you never wrote had no odds at all.

Do the work. Put your hand up for everything you qualify for. Let the results be the results.

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If your organization has been rationing itself — stop. app.grantorb.com, free to start, no credit card. Bring the grant list you already have, or let the matches come to you.

And I’d like to hear from you — especially if you think I’m wrong about any of this. I’m on LinkedIn.