Community Needs Are the Strategy: How Black-Led Nonprofits Can Reclaim the Grant Narrative

You know what it feels like to sit in front of a blank application and do the calculation: How much of this can I say? How do I describe this work without making them uncomfortable? How do I make what we do legible to people who have never experienced what our community lives every day?

You know what code-switching feels like in a grant proposal, adjusting your language, softening your framing, replacing words that are central to your mission with words that feel safer for funders. You also know what it costs to spend months building a relationship with a program officer, only to be passed over for an organization with shallower roots in your community but better access to philanthropic networks. And you know, with a discernment that comes from lived experience, that funding systems were not built with you in mind.

We’re not going to pretend otherwise. What we want to do is name what is happening and offer a grounded, community-based framework for navigating it.

The Funding Gap Is Not Hypothetical

Let’s stay with what you already know. Black-led nonprofits are doing the work and still receiving less support to sustain it. Research from Echoing Green and Bridgespan found that among comparable organizations, Black-led nonprofits have 24 percent less revenue, and when it comes to unrestricted funding, the gap widens significantly, with Black-led organizations holding 76 percent less in unrestricted assets.

That inequity shows up in both how funding is accessed and how organizations are expected to present themselves during the development process. A recent report from Candid and ABFE found that more than half of Black nonprofit leaders have experienced direct or subtle pressure to soften how they describe their work, often being encouraged to replace explicit references to “Black” communities with broader, more generalized language.

That pressure creates a quiet set of decisions that leaders are constantly navigating: what can be said plainly and what gets left unsaid altogether. And as those decisions accumulate, a system persists that under-resources Black-led work while also shaping how that work is described and understood.

When funders are most comfortable with approaches that reflect their own frameworks and experiences, organizations rooted in different histories and ways of working are implicitly or explicitly asked to conform to standards of credibility that were not designed with their work in mind. None of this changes the reality that grants are still a necessary part of many organizations’ funding strategies. But understanding this as a structural issue, rather than an individual shortcoming, allows a different, more effective grant strategy to emerge.

Community-Centered Grant Writing as a Strategy

A community-centered approach to grant writing begins with clarity about who the work is for and what it is meant to do, independent of any single funding opportunity. That clarity becomes the anchor for every decision that follows, from how programs are described to which funders are prioritized.

Here is what a community-centered grant strategy looks like:

• Name your community explicitly and unapologetically. The Candid/ABFE research found that despite pressure, most Black-led leaders maintained race-explicit language in their work. Half said they would not accept a grant that required them to obscure their racial focus. Knowing what you will and will not compromise is essential to organizational integrity and the foundation of sustainable funding.

• Find funders who already believe in your community. There is a difference between funders who are open to funding BIPOC communities and funders who are committed to it. The Grantmakers in Health framework for equitable funding describes starting with the relationship, asking questions to understand challenges and opportunities rather than to disqualify, and presuming expertise in the community-rooted leaders they are meeting. Seek funders who operate this way. They exist. They are worth the research.

• Pursue general operating support aggressively. The 76 percent gap in unrestricted assets between Black-led and white-led organizations is not accidental. Restricted, programmatic funding keeps BIPOC organizations dependent and constrained. Unrestricted general operating support enables organizations to be strategic and respond to evolving community needs. It is also a clear evaluation of funder trust. Ask for it. Advocate for it. Build funder relationships around the argument for it.

• Let your community set the agenda, not the grant calendar. Build your long-range plan first, based on what your community needs, and then find funders who share that focus. Grants should be a tool for funding work you have already decided to do, not a program development strategy. Your community's knowledge of its own needs is your most valuable asset. Do not let a grant portal determine what problems you work on.

• Document the hidden labor. Nonprofit leaders and development professionals consistently report spending enormous amounts of time on grant processes that fail to result in funding, often after months of relationship-building and proposal development. That time is a measurable organizational cost. Track it. Factor it into your funding strategy. And use it to make the case, internally and externally, for why funders who respect your time and trust your leadership are worth prioritizing over those who do not.

We want to be direct about something: the burden of fixing this should not and does not fall entirely on you. But it is your responsibility to reclaim your grant narrative.

You should not have to soften your racial identity to be seen as fundable. You should not have to spend months building a relationship with a program officer only to be passed over because someone with a lighter touch and a whiter board got there first. None of that is a reflection of the quality of your work. It is a reflection of a system that was not designed to resource it.

The strategy we are advocating for is not naive but clear-eyed about that system. And it starts from this: your community's knowledge of its own needs is the most sophisticated theory of change in the room. Your grant narrative should be built on that foundation, with or without the funder's permission to say so.

Write from there. Find the funders who can meet you there. And hold the line on the rest.

Additional Reading:

• BIPOC Nonprofit Leaders Deserve Better from Philanthropy

• Overcoming the Racial Bias in Philanthropic Funding