Our Approach
Now in our 11th year in business, Krista Kurlinkus, LLC has grown from a one-woman freelance business into a nationally recognized partner for nonprofits and changemakers who refuse to settle for the status quo.
Over the past decade, we’ve helped small nonprofits and organizations secure over $50 million in grant funding across 32 states and 10 countries, with a focus on human rights and democracy; racial and social justice; arts, culture, and humanities; and workforce and economic development. We've also taught tens of thousands of grant writers around the world through our groundbreaking courses and free trainings.
Whether you’re seeking federal grants, international opportunities, or foundation support, we bring a strategic lens, tailored tools, and a commitment to justice to everything we do.
For 11 years, Krista Kurlinkus, LLC has helped organizations across the country find, win, and manage grant funding. Our experience spans the full grant lifecycle, including grant readiness, prospect research, grant strategy, proposal development, application management, post-award grant management, and reporting.
We have helped clients secure awards ranging from $5,000 to $1.7 million, from local community grants to major federal and international opportunities. That work has shown us what creates sustainable grant success: a strong proposal supported by a clear strategy, reliable workflows, organized information, and a team that knows what to do next.
A grant should strengthen your organization. The process of pursuing it should not leave your team buried in scattered documents, missed deadlines, unclear responsibilities, and last-minute emergencies.
Our grant systems consulting helps organizations replace that chaos with a practical, repeatable process for managing grants from research through closeout. We combine hands-on grant expertise with capacity building so your team can confidently use the system after our engagement ends.
The result is an organization that can:
Every organization starts in a different place. We tailor our support to your goals, internal capacity, existing tools, and funding landscape.
Our work may include:
Many grant consulting services focus on completing the next proposal. We look at the entire grant operation surrounding that proposal.
Our recommendations come from 11 years of direct client service across a broad range of missions, fields, communities, funders, award sizes, and levels of organizational capacity. We understand how grant work functions in real organizations, where people are balancing funding deadlines with programs, operations, leadership, and daily demands.
We also bring 10 years of experience teaching grant writing to more than 11,000 students. Working with thousands of grant professionals, nonprofit leaders, staff members, and aspiring grant writers has shown us where people get stuck, which skills and processes create confidence, and what teams need to use a grant system successfully in their day-to-day work.
That combination of direct grant consulting and grant writing education shapes every system we build. We design for strong grant practices, clear adoption, and long-term use. Your team leaves with useful infrastructure, documented processes, and the knowledge to manage it independently.
We build systems around the way your team actually works. You leave with useful infrastructure, documented processes, and stronger internal capacity instead of a complicated framework that depends on a consultant to keep it running.
Your team knows which opportunities are worth pursuing. The information needed for a proposal is organized and accessible. Everyone understands their role and the timeline. Award requirements stay visible after the celebration. Reports do not become emergencies. Your organization can keep moving when staff members, priorities, or funding conditions change.
That is the value of a well-designed grant system: stronger proposals, more consistent grant management, greater internal capacity, and less stress across the entire grant lifecycle.
Our successful proposals span:
This breadth gives us practical insight into how funder expectations differ, how competitive applications are built, and which grant management systems help organizations sustain success across multiple funding sources.
Grant systems consulting helps an organization design and implement a repeatable process for finding, evaluating, applying for, tracking, managing, and reporting on grants. It can include strategy, workflows, templates, roles, document organization, deadline tracking, post-award management, and staff training.
Grant writing focuses on developing a specific proposal. Grant systems consulting strengthens the people, processes, information, and tools behind every proposal and award. We provide both, allowing immediate grant work to support lasting organizational capacity.
Yes. We can assess how your organization currently handles grants, identify the causes of missed steps or bottlenecks, and build a practical system around your team, tools, responsibilities, and funding goals.
Yes. Our experience covers the full grant lifecycle, from readiness, research, and proposal development through award tracking, reporting, compliance, funder communication, and closeout.
Yes. Internal ownership is a core goal of our work. We create usable processes and provide the training your team needs to write and manage grants with greater confidence and independence.
Led by Krista Kurlinkus, Ph.D., our team is composed of senior-level grant professionals with expertise in:
We’re not just consultants—we’re active practitioners. We write winning grants, manage portfolios, and build grant infrastructure every single day. We know what works because we’re in the work ourselves.
Peace and Justice, Women and Children, including Anti-Human Trafficking, Anti-Gender Based Violence; Democracy; Relief and Development
Education and workforce training, Career and employment services, Job creation, and Infrastructure development
Institutional foundation grants, Program grants, and Individual Academic Research Project Grants in fields including humanities, linguistics, technology, and health
Women, Immigrants and refugees, BIPOC, LGBTQ, Indigenous, and AAPI communities
Build strategic grantseeking infrastructure
Project-based services for established grantseekers
Scale your fundraising efforts with a monthly retainer
Leverage cutting-edge tools like our AI-powered Grants Hub in Notion
In our courses, memberships, and consulting partnerships, we witness the power of community every day. Strangers become collaborators. Ideas become movements. Grant writers, nonprofit leaders, and organizers come together around shared values—mutual aid, justice, equity—to build relationships that outlast any single project or proposal.
We create intentional spaces where people feel seen, supported, and challenged to grow. When we share knowledge, resources, and courage across our community, we don't just increase our impact—we transform what’s possible.
Every grant, course, and collaboration we build is shaped by imagination—not just to make our work more effective, but to make it more joyful, more human, and more just. We reject the myth that only some people are creative. Instead, we embrace creativity as a universal capacity and a vital part of every process.
We bring play, experimentation, and vision into every space we hold—because doing justice work with heart and imagination doesn’t just change outcomes. It changes people. It changes the future.
We speak up. We take risks. We stand firm in the face of silence, dismissal, or disapproval. We believe in justice—not as a brand, but as a daily practice of solidarity, integrity, and collective action.
We believe Black Lives Matter. We defend the bodily autonomy of people with uteruses. We fight for LGBTQIA+ liberation. We demand immigrant justice and the right for every person to live, move, and thrive without fear. We uphold disability rights and know that accessibility is foundational, not optional. We work toward economic equity and reject systems that concentrate wealth and gatekeep opportunity. We protect democratic values—and know they must be expanded, defended, and reimagined by and for the people.
We are unequivocally against genocide, state violence, displacement, and militarism, no matter where it occurs. From Palestine to the Congo, from Syria to Indigenous communities in the U.S. resisting land theft and extraction, we mourn the lives lost and stand in solidarity with all who resist.
We won’t dilute our message to court comfort. Our courage is principled, practiced, and unapologetically aligned with the future we’re here to build: liberated, collective, and rooted in care.
We turn your organization’s knowledge into compelling writing.
Then we build the system that puts it to work across your team.