Grant Writing · Workforce Development · Strategic Partnerships · Greater Syracuse Area
I help mission-driven organizations secure funding, build lasting partnerships, and design programs that actually deliver. Ten years doing all three at once — in CNY and beyond.
I spent nearly nine years at Oswego County PTECH at CiTi BOCES doing work that doesn't have a clean job title: writing and managing the grants, building and stewarding 50+ industry partnerships, designing the curriculum frameworks, tracking the outcomes, and reporting all of it back to funders. The program grew. The funding held. The students got jobs.
That work required managing a $2.5M+ annual program budget including $550K NYSED continuation grant — with zero compliance findings across nine reporting cycles. It required growing an industry partner network from 3 to 50+ organizations. And it required translating all of it into data and narratives that funders, state officials, and community stakeholders could trust.
More recently with ERIE21 at Le Moyne College, I helped secure a timeline extension on a multi-million dollar state grant by reimagining the program as a multigenerational, community-based workforce initiative — then contributed to strategic planning, curriculum design, and data frameworks to deliver on that vision.
I also work with AI as a genuine thought partner — using it to pressure-test strategy, accelerate drafting, and produce higher-quality work faster. If you're a small nonprofit without a full development team, that means you get senior-level grant support at a pace and price point that works.
I'm available for freelance grant writing, development consulting, and partnership strategy. What makes me different: I think in systems. I don't just write the grant — I understand the program it needs to fund, the partners it needs to hold, and the outcomes it needs to produce.
I work with nonprofits, educational institutions, workforce organizations, and mission-driven employers across CNY and nationally (remote). Whether you need a single grant written or an ongoing development partner, every engagement comes with the same thing: someone who understands not just the proposal, but the program behind it. All work is AI-augmented — faster research, sharper drafts, more iterations before anything goes out the door.
Full-cycle grant writing from prospect research through submission. Specializing in workforce development, education, STEM, and community programs. Federal, state, foundation, and corporate funders.
Reporting, budget tracking, funder compliance, and renewal strategy for existing awards. Bring order to complex multi-grant portfolios. Audit-ready documentation and process systems — nine years of zero findings.
Build and formalize industry, education, and community partnerships that unlock funding eligibility and program capacity. MOU development, employer engagement strategy, and relationship stewardship.
Program design, employer alignment, and pipeline strategy for workforce and apprenticeship programs. Deep expertise in PTECH, early college, advanced manufacturing, and sector-based training models.
Pricing varies with scope, complexity, and funder requirements — but every engagement starts with a flat-fee scope so you know the cost before any work begins. Below is the range you can expect.
Two examples of the kind of work I do — one that turned a workforce program into a multimillion-dollar capital investment, and one that pulled a grant cliff back from the edge by reframing the program around the community it actually serves.
Oswego County PTECH was running an advanced manufacturing program in partnership with SUNY Onondaga Community College. The model worked educationally — but the logistics were eating into the program's actual value. We were bussing students from across Oswego County to OCC for lab time, a ride of over an hour each way for many of them. On top of that, we were competing with OCC's own students for lab space and instructor availability, which meant scheduling was constantly under pressure and students were getting less hands-on time than the curriculum called for.
The opportunity: build a lab centrally located in Mexico, NY — closer to where our students actually lived. Less time on a bus, more time with their hands on the equipment. And critically, the space could do more than serve PTECH during the school day: at night, it could host adult education, reskilling and upskilling for partner organizations' staff, and a long list of other community workforce opportunities.
This was a team effort — I didn't write the proposal end-to-end alone, and I want to be clear about that. My two specific contributions were the pieces I'd offer to a client:
Lab design. I translated what our industry partners actually needed in incoming workers into what the lab needed to physically contain — equipment, workflow, training stations, dual-use capacity for adult ed at night. That translation is what made the rest of the proposal defensible: the lab wasn't a wish list, it was a direct answer to the skills employers were telling us they couldn't hire for.
The partner pitch. The state grant required matching funds, and we set an internal target of a 50% match. I led the conversations with industry partners to ask them to put real money behind the program. The pitch worked because the lab design gave partners something concrete to invest in — a space that would produce workers trained on the equipment they actually used. Our partners saw the potential right away and pulled out their checkbooks. We blew past the 50% goal.
The state awarded the $750K capital grant. The matching campaign brought in a documented $750K from industry partners — a full dollar-for-dollar match, far beyond the 50% we'd targeted. Total capital investment unlocked: $1.5M, a centrally located lab serving PTECH students during the day and adult workforce programming at night.
The grant funded because the program made sense — and the program made sense because we'd done the underlying work: understanding the skills the local economy actually needed, designing space that addressed it, and giving industry partners a reason to write checks beyond moral support. That's the kind of work I'm offering when I take a client on. Not just a proposal — a proposal that holds up because the program behind it actually solves something.
I joined ERIE21 at Le Moyne College with a little over a year of primary NYS DOL grant runway remaining and over $2M in unspent funds at risk of lapsing. The team was running youth, young adult, and adult programming — but each in its own lane, with limited coordination between them. The director was working remotely and in transition. The senior director was on leave. There was a real gap in day-to-day leadership and a lot of questions without clear answers.
I learned the programming on my own — sat with what existed, read the reporting, talked to the staff actually running the work. When senior leadership returned and asked for a "future thinking" meeting, I prepared by meeting individually with my counterparts managing the young adult and adult tracks — asking each one what they were doing, where they were stuck, and where they saw overlap with the other programs.
What I saw was a coherence problem dressed up as three separate programs. The youth, young adult, and adult tracks weren't really separate populations — they were members of the same families, the same neighborhoods, the same Syracuse-region workforce facing the same shifting technology landscape. The smarter framing was multigenerational: a program that could move an entire family up the skills curve at once, in step with the new jobs coming into the region, rather than picking off one age band at a time.
The multigenerational reframe — combined with the team's broader positioning work — helped secure a one-year timeline extension on the NYS DOL grant, protecting over $2M in unspent funds that would otherwise have lapsed. More importantly, it gave ERIE21 the runway to actually execute on the new model instead of winding down.
Through May 2026, I contributed to strategic planning, curriculum design (6th grade hackathon and Radiation Heroes STEAM day), proposal development, and organizational planning documentation.
A grant clock running out usually isn't just a funding problem — it's a coherence problem. Funders extend timelines when they can see a clear, defensible story about what the next period will unlock. The work I did at ERIE21 — mapping what each program actually does, finding the synergies that nobody had time to notice, and reframing the initiative into something a funder could justify keeping alive — is the work I do when clients are facing grant cliffs, program sunsets, or organizations that feel like they're running multiple unrelated bets instead of one aligned one.
Whether you need a grant written, a portfolio managed, or a partnership built — I'd love to hear from you.
Currently available for: freelance grant writing projects, development consulting retainers, and partnership strategy engagements.
CNY-based nonprofits, educational institutions, and workforce training organizations are especially welcome.