Face Friends Foundation is an all-volunteer, fully virtual nonprofit based in Sugar Hill, Georgia, building the Sugar Hill Workforce Academy — a commercial culinary incubator kitchen and technical literacy lab serving the Gwinnett County corridor. Our mission is to create real economic opportunity for youth, unemployed adults, and small business owners in our community.
While we have talented writers on our volunteer team and an AI agent capable of producing grant application drafts, we do not have a trained grant writer who understands the specialized discipline of nonprofit grant writing — funder language, narrative structure, eligibility alignment, budget justification, and the specific framing that moves a foundation or government funder from interest to investment. The result is grant applications that are well written in a general sense but lack the precision, persuasion, and funder specific positioning that winning applications require.
What is getting in the way of progress is the absence of grant writing expertise within our volunteer team and no documented framework for our writers to follow when approaching different types of funders. Each application is approached differently, inconsistently, and without a replicable process that improves over time.
We have attempted to address this through AI assisted grant drafting however without a trained grant writer reviewing, refining, and strengthening those drafts before submission our applications are not reaching their full potential. We have also experienced staff turnover in our volunteer team which means any grant writing knowledge gained leaves with the volunteer rather than staying with the organization.
We need a pro bono grant writing consultant to train our existing volunteer writers, review and strengthen our current grant applications, and leave behind a documented grant writing blueprint that any future writer can pick up and follow —
By the end of this project we expect the pro bono consultant to deliver grant writing training and a documented blueprint that builds lasting grant writing capacity within our all-volunteer nonprofit team — ensuring every application we submit is competitive, funder aligned, and professionally crafted regardless of which volunteer produces it.
The specific deliverables are:
1. Grant Writing Skills Assessment: An honest evaluation of our current volunteer writers — identifying their strengths, gaps, and the specific areas of grant writing craft that need the most development before they can produce competitive applications independently.
2. Grant Writing Training: A structured, documented training program designed specifically for volunteer nonprofit writers operating in a virtual, asynchronous environment. The program covers:
How to read and interpret grant guidelines
Funder research and alignment strategy
Narrative structure and persuasive storytelling for grant applications
Budget justification and financial narrative writing
Logic models and program outcome framing
Common mistakes that cause applications to be rejected
3. A Grant Writing Blueprint: A comprehensive, reusable grant writing playbook that any current or future volunteer writer can follow independently. The blueprint covers:
Step by step application process from guidelines review to final submission
Funder specific writing approaches for foundations, government funders, and corporate giving programs
Narrative templates and structural frameworks for different grant types
A quality control checklist every application passes through before reaching the Executive Director for review and submission
4. AI Integration Guide A documented framework showing how our volunteer writers work alongside Marcus, our AI grant drafting agent — what Marcus produces, what the human writer refines, and what the quality control review covers before submission.
