How Global Refuge Increased Grant Proposals by 500%

The phone call that changed everything

In early 2025, the grants team at Global Refuge got the news they'd been dreading. Federal funding for refugee resettlement — the financial backbone of the organization for 85 years — was being cut. Not trimmed. Not reduced. Effectively eliminated.

Global Refuge, formerly known as HIAS, is one of the oldest and largest refugee resettlement organizations in the United States. For decades, they operated through a public-private partnership model: federal dollars covered the infrastructure, and private grants supplemented programs and services. That model had worked for generations. And now it was gone.

What followed was one of the most remarkable scaling stories I've seen in the nonprofit sector. In less than a year, a team of fewer than five grant professionals went from submitting roughly 19 proposals annually to projecting over 130 — a 500% increase. They retained 100% of their funding partners. They beat the national grant award rate by 10 percentage points. And they did it without burning out a single team member.

This is the story of how they pulled it off.

The scope of the crisis

To understand what Global Refuge faced, you need to understand how deeply embedded federal funding was in their operating model. This wasn't a line item that could be absorbed. It was the foundation the entire organization was built on.

When the cuts hit, the consequences were immediate and severe. Offices closed. Staff — talented, dedicated people who had built careers serving refugee communities — were laid off. Services were scaled back at the exact moment global displacement was reaching record highs. More people needed help than ever before, and the money to provide it was vanishing.

Bethany Barkley, who leads the grants function, described the moment bluntly: they were forced to make painful decisions about closing offices and laying off staff while trying to keep their doors open to people seeking safety.

The grants team was handed an impossible mandate: replace federal funding with private grants. Not over five years. Not with a phased transition plan. Now.

They had 2.5 frontline fundraisers.

Why the old approach couldn't work

The math was straightforward and unforgiving. To replace the lost federal revenue, Global Refuge needed to dramatically increase the number of private foundation proposals they submitted. But grant writing is one of the most time-intensive forms of professional writing that exists. A single competitive proposal can take 40 to 80 hours. Even a strong letter of inquiry takes a full day when you account for research, drafting, internal review, and revision.

At 19 proposals a year, the team was already working at capacity. Getting to 130 wasn't a matter of working harder or longer hours. It was a mathematical impossibility under the old workflow. They would have needed to hire three or four additional grant writers — staff they couldn't afford, in a timeline that didn't allow for recruiting and onboarding.

Natalie Ledeboer-Cid, the team's grants coordinator, put it plainly: they simply could not put out the volume required with 2.5 frontline fundraisers. Something fundamental had to change.

The reluctant adoption

When the team first explored using Grantable — an AI-powered grant management platform — the reaction was mixed. Grant professionals don't tend to be early adopters of AI. They got into this work because they love writing. They love the craft of translating mission into narrative, of building the case that moves a funder from interest to investment.

Hannah Freedberg, the team's Foundation Relations Officer, captured this tension perfectly. She described herself as a reluctant user of AI — an English major who loved the creative process of writing. The idea of handing any part of that process to a machine felt wrong.

But the crisis didn't leave room for philosophical debates about the role of AI in creative work. The team needed capacity they didn't have, and they needed it immediately. So they started experimenting.

What happened next surprised them.

The 5th team member

As Grantable became part of their daily workflow, something shifted. The tool didn't replace the parts of grant writing the team loved. It replaced the parts they didn't — the formatting, the repetitive content assembly, the mechanical work of adapting the same organizational language to different word counts and funder formats.

The team started referring to Grantable as their 5th team member. They even gave it a name: Aileen (AI-leen). It was a joke, but it reflected something real — the tool had become integral to how they worked together.

Natalie described the role precisely: Grantable acts as a brainstorming partner, a smart library, and an editor. The humans on the team kept doing what humans do best — building funder relationships, gathering client stories, making strategic decisions about which opportunities to pursue. The AI handled the labor-intensive groundwork that used to consume their days.

How they actually use the platform

The Global Refuge team's workflow is worth examining in detail because it illustrates something important: AI doesn't replace grant writing expertise. It multiplies it. Every step of their process has a human making the strategic decisions and the AI doing the heavy lifting underneath.

Building the institutional memory

The first thing the team did was upload everything. Past proposals. Reports. Their theory of change. Logic models for each program. Organizational documents that captured how they describe their mission, their communities, and their impact. All of it went into the platform, creating a searchable, reusable foundation that every team member could draw from.

This step is easy to underestimate, but it was transformative. The team had always had institutional knowledge, but it lived in individual people's heads, in scattered folders, in email threads. Centralizing it meant that a proposal started two years ago could inform a proposal being written today. A brilliant framing of their transportation program from one application could be surfaced and adapted for a completely different funder.

As Natalie described it, she now has a smart library with probably a hundred different ways the team has described their mission. When a new funder asks for a 50-word mission description versus a 1,000-word version, she doesn't start from scratch. She starts from the best of what they've already written.

One-time setup, used everywhere

The team encoded their organizational profile — mission, programs, key stats, community descriptions — into the platform once. That profile now gets injected into every AI generation automatically. No copy-pasting. No rebuilding context from scratch for each proposal. The AI already knows who Global Refuge is before the first word is drafted.

From two hours to twenty minutes

The most dramatic efficiency gain came in first-draft generation. The team uses Grantable's AI Helper to produce initial drafts by pulling relevant content from their library, adapting it to the specific RFP requirements, and generating section-by-section output that the human writer then refines.

The numbers tell the story: what used to take two hours to pull a first draft together now takes twenty minutes to get to the first round of editing. And because the AI is drawing on their own past work — their voice, their data, their framing — the editing is refinement, not reconstruction.

Making connections humans might miss

One of the more unexpected benefits was how the AI helped the team identify alignment between their programs and funder priorities that they might not have surfaced on their own. Natalie gave a vivid example: a funder focused on health outcomes might not seem like a natural fit for a capital request to replace aging minivans. But those vans transport clients to doctor appointments and English classes — directly supporting health access and community integration.

Grantable helped make those connections visible, giving the team language and framing to articulate alignment they intuitively understood but hadn't always spelled out in proposals.

Coordinating through the surge

When you go from 19 proposals a year to 130, coordination becomes a serious challenge. Who's working on what? What's the status of the proposal for Foundation X? Did we incorporate the feedback from the last cycle?

For a team of fewer than five people managing a portfolio that quintupled in size, this visibility wasn't a nice-to-have. It was the difference between organized scaling and chaos.

The results

The headline number — 500% increase in proposals — is striking. But the numbers underneath it tell a richer story.

In 2020, the team submitted 19 proposals. By 2025, they were projecting over 130. They were averaging five submissions per week. Not five drafts sitting in review. Five completed, submitted proposals going out the door every week.

Their funder retention rate held at 100% for two consecutive years. In a period when funders could have reasonably walked away from an organization in crisis, not a single one did. If anything, the proposals were getting more thoughtful, more personalized, more attuned to each funder's specific priorities — because the team had more time for the relationship work that makes retention possible.

Their grant award rate exceeded the national average by 10 percentage points. More proposals, and better proposals.

And the metric Bethany considers most important: zero team burnout. Not one person on the grants team burned out during what was arguably the most demanding period in the organization's history. Bethany framed the ROI of Grantable as tangible proof that she cares about work-life balance. There was no way, she said, that 118 proposals would have kept her team's mental health intact without the tool.

What the team does with the time they got back

This is the part of the story that matters most, and it's the part that numbers alone can't capture.

The grants team at Global Refuge doesn't spend their extra hours submitting even more proposals. They spend them on the work that no AI can do. Gathering stories from the families they serve. Sitting with program staff to understand how services are actually being delivered on the ground. Building the kind of authentic funder relationships that turn one-time grants into long-term partnerships.

Kendra Hernandez, the team's Corporate Giving Specialist, described it this way: the tool allows them more time to tell their funders the stories of their clients, to walk alongside them day to day. It opened up a new world where they can go further together.

The ripple effects extend beyond the grants team. Program staff are no longer interrupted constantly for stats, stories, and program details — because that information is already centralized and accessible. Direct service workers know their work is being supported at the fundraising level. The organization can deliver on its promise to provide comprehensive support to refugee families, even as the funding landscape shifts beneath them.

The lesson for every nonprofit

Global Refuge's story is specific to their crisis, their mission, and their team. But the underlying pattern applies broadly.

When a small team faces an overwhelming increase in workload, the conventional options are: hire more people (expensive and slow), work longer hours (unsustainable), or accept that you'll do less. Global Refuge found a fourth option. They invested in tooling that multiplied the capacity of the people they already had.

The critical detail is that the team didn't hand their grant writing to an AI and walk away. They built a system where AI handles the mechanical labor — assembly, formatting, first-draft generation, content adaptation — while humans handle everything that requires judgment, relationships, and mission expertise. The AI is the foundation. The humans are the architects.

Hannah, the self-described reluctant AI user, captured the balance perfectly. She still gets to write. She still gets to do the parts of writing she loves most — making it shine. The difference is that she starts from a draft that already understands her organization, instead of from a blank page.

For an English major who loves the craft of writing, that's not a compromise. It's a better version of the job.

Where they go from here

Global Refuge is no longer in crisis mode. They've built a funding model that doesn't depend on any single source. They've proven that a small team with the right tools can operate at a scale that would have been unthinkable three years ago. And they've done it in a way that made the work better, not just faster.

The federal funding landscape for refugee resettlement remains uncertain. But Global Refuge has something more durable than any single government contract: a diversified funding base, strong funder relationships, a proven grant-writing operation, and a team that knows exactly how to scale when the mission demands it.

They turned a crisis into a capability. And the families they serve are better for it.