Funding begins
with knowing
who you are.
For Granted helps nonprofits and mission-driven organizations capture, structure, and deploy their institutional story. Funding becomes a byproduct, not a scramble.
For Granted helps nonprofits and mission-driven organizations capture, structure, and deploy their institutional story. Funding becomes a byproduct, not a scramble.
Grant portals that reward polish over impact. Leaders who can explain their mission beautifully in conversation, but freeze when faced with a 12-page application.
Institutional memory locked in someone's head, lost when they leave. The same narratives rewritten from scratch every funding cycle, never compounding.
The bottleneck is not funding. It is translation, structure, and memory.
80%
of grant questions are variations of the same 10 asks, yet most organizations answer them from scratch each time
$0
in additional impact generated by scrambling. Preparation is what wins funding, not eloquence
"If it is not captured, it does not compound."
The founding belief of For Granted
An inventory of your story. The complete, centralized, structured repository of who your organization is: past, present, inside and out.
Layer I
Everything the world can see: website, annual reports, social media, IRS 990, news coverage. Your visible identity layer.
Layer II
What the public does not see: strategic plans, past grants, board documents, program logic, internal decisions. Your operational truth layer.
Layer III · This is where we come in
Active excavation through conversation: interviews with your leaders, staff, board, and clients. This is where tone becomes authentic and language becomes human. The soul layer.
"The Inven(s)tory does not just help you write grants. It helps you understand who you are."
Every engagement follows the same disciplined arc. What varies is the organization, and what emerges is always surprising.
We go everywhere you are: website, social, news, IRS filings, Charity Navigator, GuideStar. We read everything. We flag every inconsistency and document what is working and what is not.
Strategic plans, past grant applications, board reports, program logic, budget history. We collect, organize, and begin seeing patterns between what you say publicly and what you do internally.
We come to you. We talk to your Executive Director, program staff, board, and clients. We record, transcribe, and extract the authentic language of your organization: the words no document ever captured.
We organize everything: mission, programs, outcomes, financials, evidence, partnerships. Then we reconcile: where does your public story drift from your internal reality? Where are the inconsistencies funders will find first?
A structured, searchable knowledge system: your organization's complete institutional memory, centralized and ready. The answer bank. The consistency engine. The foundation for every future application.
Every future application pulls from a living, verified library of who you are. Your story does not change. It compounds. You stop starting from zero and start from a place of preparation.
A complete, structured document library: your institutional memory made searchable and usable. Public layer, internal layer, and transcripts organized into a living knowledge base.
A custom AI assistant trained exclusively on your organization's knowledge: your voice, your evidence, your history. Drop in any grant application and get a first draft in minutes, not days.
The process surfaces contradictions, drift, and under-leveraged stories you did not know you had. Most organizations discover they are stronger than they realized, and have drifted further than they thought.
Stop rebuilding your narrative from scratch every cycle. Stop searching Google Drive for the grant you wrote three years ago. Your answers are already there. You just assemble them.
The knowledge does not leave when people do. Site visit transcripts, leadership interviews, and decision rationale are captured and preserved: your organization's history in its own words.
AI-powered funder matching tools work best when the organization profile beneath them is deep, consistent, and verified. The Inven(s)tory is that profile. The richer it is, the more precisely the right funders find you.
For Granted serves organizations that believe their story is worth telling well, and who are willing to do the work of capturing it. We are not a grant-writing service. We are a preparation system.
We work primarily in Northeast Ohio and the broader Cleveland ecosystem, with deep experience in:
Recovery and Substance Use Disorder organizations
Workforce development nonprofits
Education organizations and school districts
Public sector and civic institutions
Mission-driven startups seeking early-stage capital
Health and human services nonprofits
OneOhio Recovery Foundation
Deep public funding strategy: region-by-region board analysis, abatement strategy alignment, budget-as-moral-document methodology. Validated the system under maximum pressure.
Primary Purpose Center
Recovery and workforce programming. Site visit and transcript-driven Inven(s)tory, translating lived program experience into fundable evidence language.
Fund the Climb
Recovery housing expansion. Inven(s)tory built around Lili Reitz's authentic voice, used to power grant applications to multiple funders simultaneously.
Teaching Cleveland
Educational storytelling and community history. Inven(s)tory structured around program evidence, community partnerships, and institutional narrative depth.
Story before strategy.
Strategy without story becomes brittle. Story without structure becomes unusable. They have to evolve together.
Evidence is a system, not a citation.
"Evidence-based" rarely means peer-reviewed only. It means consistency, measurement logic, a plausible theory of change, and the capacity to report. We build that system.
Preparation beats eloquence.
The strongest grant applications are not the most beautifully written. They are the most prepared. Funders can tell the difference between depth and decoration.
AI is a multiplier, not a replacement.
We use AI to reduce cognitive load, surface patterns, and reuse high-quality thinking. The human voice (the site visit, the transcript, the relationship) is always at the center.
If it is not captured, it does not compound.
Conversations, decisions, program rationale, institutional knowledge: these are assets, not exhaust. We treat them accordingly.
Co-Founder · Narrative and Relationships
Shane is the archivist. He listens the way archivists listen: not just for answers, but for patterns, subtext, the structure underneath language. He began recording meetings, transcribing them, rereading them, extracting sentences that deserved permanence.
He carries deep fluency in public systems, nonprofit governance, and funder relationships. But what defines him more than any credential is curiosity, and a belief that organizations deserve better than scrambling.
Co-Founder · Systems and Operations
Tyler is the builder. He moves through rooms with the quiet calibration of an operator, less interested in what sounds good, more interested in what scales. Where Shane sees narrative layers, Tyler sees system architecture.
He brings discipline without rigidity. Realism without cynicism. He has seen early-stage ventures collapse under over-promise, and he has no interest in building something fragile.
"For Granted is not a company that writes grants. It is a company that helps organizations understand themselves well enough that funding becomes a byproduct, not a scramble."
The founding vision
Every engagement starts with a conversation. We want to understand who you are, what you are seeking, and whether an Inven(s)tory is the right fit for where you are right now.
Cleveland, Ohio · hello@forgranted.com