esterday, Jericho Road hosted the first session of GrantBuilder AI Bootcamp, a two-day workshop led by LaQuetta Shamblee, of The GrantBuilder LLC, a professional grant writer and consultant who has been developing this system and brought it to us to pilot with our nonprofit community.
The room was full of people at every level of AI familiarity and grant writing experience. Some had never written a grant before. Some had never opened ChatGPT. Others had years of grant writing under their belt and were looking for ways to work smarter. Others had been using it for months but weren’t sure they were doing it right. Almost everyone walked in some concerns: Will it sound like us? Is it ethical? Can funders tell, and do they even care?
By the end of the day, people were building something they’d never had before: a centralized repository of their organization’s core narrative content, structured around the 10 building blocks that show up in virtually every grant application. Mission. Organizational history. Needs assessment. Target population. Program description. Goals and objectives. Implementation plan. Evaluation. Sustainability. Budget.
Most nonprofits have this information scattered across old grants, staff emails, outdated websites, and someone’s memory. This workshop was about pulling it together once, building it out in multiple lengths, and never starting from scratch again.
One participant said it best: “This is the least frustrating grant writing experience I’ve ever had, and only because all the hard work was already done.”
We wrapped the session by doing something a little ridiculous and completely necessary: we put our photos into Gemini and turned ourselves into superheroes.
And let’s face it, if you’re a nonprofit professional doing more with less, writing grants at 11pm, and figuring out AI on the fly while running programs and managing volunteers, you already are a superhero.
Session two is next week. We’ll share what comes out of it.
