This episode, Kari Collins explains the problems with working as a in-house grant writer, how to get nonprofits to value you properly, and how grant writers can raise their rates by a considerable margin.
Kari is a Philadelphia-based grant writer specializing in small and start-up nonprofits, who has worked in the non-profit field for over a decade.
Kari explains the business side of being a grant writing consultant, how to be properly valued as a grant writer, and how to effectively price your grant writing services.
They also talk about the different deliverables grant writers should offer, the business and sales lessons they learned in the academy, and the value of being a part of a community of grant writers inside the Freelance Grant Writer Academy.
What you’ll learn in this episode:
- The problem with working as a staff grant writer.
- The business side of being a grant writing consultant.
- How to be properly valued as a grant writer.
- The different business and sales lessons available in the academy.
- How to price your grant writing services.
- The different deliverables grant writers should offer.
- How grant writers can raise their rates.
- How to get a nonprofit to value you properly.
- The value of having a community of grant writers when you work as a freelancer.
- Different ways to celebrate your grant writing wins.
About Kari Collins
Kari is a Philadelphia-based grant writer specializing in small and start-up nonprofits. They have worked in the non-profit field since 2010, including running a community center out of a historic church building for 6 years.
As a non-binary person, Kari’s career path has been anything but straightforward. They graduated seminary with an MDiv in 2013, but quickly became disillusioned with the difficulty of forging a faith-based career as an openly LGBTQ+ person. They moved back into nonprofit work with a focus on creating community spaces for activists and visionaries.
Kari launched their consulting business in 2023 to expand their impact and avoid the glass ceiling faced by people who don’t match the typical image of non-profit leadership. They’ve since raised over $2 million for their clients, and helped multiple volunteer and part-time founders become full-time executive directors!
Connect with Kari:
Quotables:
- “All grant writers must become freelance grant writers because it’s so different than being a staff grant writer. It’s an entirely different relationship and it’s empowering because staff granters are so often taken advantage of.”
- “It’s been useful in the academy to delineate these things as separate deliverables because too often people thought of it as an attachment of a grant when it’s a totally separate piece and should be accounted as such.”
- “The community that’s available in the academy is so valuable. Often someone will show up and have a question that I haven’t been able to articulate, and having that feeling of community of people in the same line of work as me helps me feel like I have another world of resources.”
Resources mentioned in this episode:
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