Cassandra Grimes

If you’re an Executive Director or Board Member at a growth stage nonprofit, you’ve probably realized that you can no longer "wing it" when it comes to fundraising. You know you need help, but when you start looking, you’re met with a dizzying array of titles: grant writers, fractional CDOs, development consultants, and strategists. You want a partner; you’re being offered a menu of jargon. The reality is that the market is full of titles that sound similar but solve very different problems....

Your board’s urgency might be costing you more than your fundraising gap. Your board just looked at your revenue projections, panicked, and gave you the most dangerous advice in the nonprofit world: "We just need to hire a Development Director." If you follow that advice blindly, you’re about to set five figures on fire. Hiring a full-time fundraiser is often treated like a "silver bullet" for a cash-strapped nonprofit, but without the right systems, it’s just an expensive way to fail. You...

If your "grant pipeline" is just a spreadsheet of deadlines you’re frantically trying to meet, you’re not building a strategy: you're running a lottery. Most mid-sized nonprofits are leaving six figures on the table every single year because they treat grant seeking as a clerical task rather than a leadership priority. You don't need more grants to apply to. You need a better way to win. At Accelerate Change, we’ve seen it all. Our founder, Cassandra Grimes, has secured over $23M in grants...