SoloMama LaunchPad
How One Phone Call Changed the Way Annette Applies for Grants
- Entrepreneurs Introduced to GRANTED
- 7
- Winter Cohort Target
- 15
- End-of-Year Participation Goal
- 20
Story overview
Annette McLeod helps single mothers in the Greater Toronto Area build and grow their businesses. But finding funding for her program meant searching grant websites manually, preparing applications, and balancing it all with her work supporting entrepreneurs. With GRANTED, she can discover more funding opportunities, get support refining applications, and help seven participants explore funding for their own businesses. Here's how she's making grant access more practical for her community.
About
Discover how Annette McLeod uses GRANTED to find funding opportunities, simplify grant application work, and help single-mother entrepreneurs access funding for their businesses.
How Annette McLeod Uses GRANTED to Help Single-Mother Entrepreneurs Access Funding
Customer: Annette McLeod, Program Director
Location: Greater Toronto Area, Canada
Use case: Grant discovery, application support, and community funding education
Overview
For nonprofit program directors, finding funding is only one part of the job. They also have to run programs, support participants, manage deadlines, and demonstrate impact to their own funders.
For Annette McLeod, who runs a program helping single mothers in the Greater Toronto Area build and grow their businesses, grant applications were becoming another job on top of the one she already had.
GRANTED is helping her discover more funding opportunities, improve how she communicates her projects to funders, and extend those benefits to the entrepreneurs in her program.
The Challenge: Finding Funding While Running a Program
Before using GRANTED, Annette relied on manual research to find grants. She searched funders' websites individually, checked eligibility requirements, and worked through applications while learning what grant reviewers expected.
The process was time-consuming. Finding relevant opportunities was difficult, and preparing applications required considerable effort alongside her existing responsibilities.
As she explained:
"I was figuring it out as I went. And it was working, slowly, but I knew there had to be a better way."
The core challenge was threefold:
- Limited visibility: Finding relevant funding opportunities meant searching multiple websites and relying on platforms with limited, infrequently updated listings.
- Time-intensive applications: Researching eligibility and adapting project descriptions for different funders took time away from program delivery.
- Limited capacity: Annette needed a more manageable way to pursue funding while supporting the people who depended on her program.
She wasn't short on commitment. She needed a better way to manage the work.
The Solution: A More Practical Way to Find and Pursue Grants
With GRANTED, Annette gained a more accessible way to explore funding opportunities and work through the application process.
1. Broader visibility into funding opportunities
Instead of relying on a short list of suggested grants, Annette could browse opportunities and filter them by location, project type, and relevance to her work.