The Realignment Practice
“The people most impacted have the answers. They are just separated from the resources.”
That is the problem Grants and Grit was built to address.
Not a lack of good intentions. Not a shortage of capital. A distance problem. Between funders and communities. Between stated values and actual practice. Between the people making decisions about resources and the people who know how those resources should move.
Somewhere along the way philanthropy became a game. Organizations learned to contort themselves to say what funders want to hear. Funders learned to chase headlines and follow what other foundations were doing. The distance got too wide and nobody named it.
The Realignment Practice is how we close that distance.
WHAT REALIGNMENT ACTUALLY MEANS
Realignment is not a rebrand.
Most institutions have gone through some version of an equity audit, a strategic planning process, or a board retreat. They have updated their language. Some have updated their guidelines. A few have updated their staff.
And still the distance remains.
Because the distance is not a policy problem. It is a relationship problem. A perspective problem. Sometimes a courage problem.
Realignment is the work of closing that gap for real. It looks different in every institution but it always starts in the same place: an honest accounting of where capital is actually going, why it is going there, and what would have to be true for it to go somewhere better.
HOW WE WORK
We do not start with your strategic plan. We start with what is actually happening.
Who is making decisions and how? Where the disconnects live between your board, your donors, and your program staff. What organizations in your portfolio are doing the real work, and whether they have what they need to sustain it. What your team believes about the communities you fund and how close those beliefs are to reality.
From that accounting, we build forward. Strategy, structure, culture, relationships. The full picture of what has to change for capital to actually move the way your institution says it wants to move.
We do this work through funding strategy sessions, portfolio design, board and staff retreats, executive advisement, and direct organizational support. Those are entry points, not the work itself. The work is always realignment.
WHO THIS IS FOR
This work is for funders who are ready to be honest.
Program officers who came up in the field and feel the pull of what they knew before the golden handcuffs got comfortable. Executives navigating boards that have not been in community in decades. New program staff who are already sensing the dysfunction but do not have language for it yet. Leadership teams that know the gap between their stated values and their actual practice is real and want help closing it.
If you are looking for a consultant to validate the decisions you have already made, we are not the right fit.
If you are ready to look honestly at how your institution moves capital and do the work to move it better, we are.
WHY GRANTS AND GRIT
We have been on both sides of this equation.
We know what it looks like inside a foundation when a program officer is trying to fund differently and cannot get the board to move. We know what it looks like inside a nonprofit when the executive director is writing a grant narrative that contorts the organization's real work into whatever language the funder wants to see.
We have run organizations. We have led grantmaking portfolios. We have been in rooms with donors, with boards, and with frontline workers, bringing them into the same room.
We know what the field actually needs and we know what funders are actually afraid of. That position is rare. We use it in service of both.
That range is not a biography detail. It is our methodology. You cannot close the distance between capital and community if you have only ever stood on one side of it.