Scaling Funding Capacity through Grant Strategy
Employ to Empower
Grants + Strategy
Employ to Empower (ETE) is a Vancouver-based charity that supports individuals facing systemic barriers to traditional employment such as mental health challenges, disability or addition recovery, by fostering entrepreneurship and community connection.
Through training, networking, mentorship, and access to referrals and supports, ETE equips aspiring entrepreneurs with the tools and resources needed to build their confidence and small businesses.
With an emphasis on empowerment, ETE’s programs create pathways for meaningful income generation while nurturing community and belonging among participants. The organization has become a cornerstone of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside social enterprise community, helping entrepreneurs turn ideas into sustainable small businesses that strengthen the local economy and inspire others.
Challenge
As ETE’s programming grew, so did the need for reliable and diversified funding to sustain operations and expand its reach.
The team needed support identifying promising funding sources and specialized expertise to pursue them efficiently. With limited staff time and budget to outsource grant writing services for individual applications, they needed an affordable, efficient approach that could generate a high volume of competitive applications in a short time.
Solution
Changemark designed a two-phase funding strategy that combined grant prospecting with a batch writing model— an approach that maximizes impact for organizations with limited resources by grouping similar grant applications together.
This model eliminated repetitive onboarding and content development, allowing one contractor to prepare and submit 20 grant applications in under two months.
Services included:
Grant Prospecting + Writing
Conducting comprehensive grant prospecting across government, community and corporate foundations, and private funding streams to identify viable opportunities aligned with ETE’s mission, values, and programs.
Prioritizing short-form grant opportunities — applications that require lower effort (typically 1–5 hours each), often with word-limited fields or online submission forms — allowing for faster turnaround and higher submission volume.
Developing standardized, funder-ready content to maintain consistent messaging across applications while customizing key sections to reflect each funder’s priorities.
Providing strategic guidance on budgets, timelines, and submission management, ensuring cohesion and efficiency across all applications.
Results
The two-phase funding strategy strengthened ETE’s fundraising capacity and set the stage for more sustainable growth.
Impact Highlights to Date:
20 short-form grant applications submitted through one coordinated process
$151,000 in confirmed multi-year funding secured to date
Creation of a reusable library of standardized grant content for future use
By pairing strategic prospecting with an efficient batch application model, Changemark helped ETE streamline its approach to fundraising, turning limited resources into a high-impact portfolio of funder-ready applications.
Interested in Learning More?
Let’s talk about how we can help you build a stronger, more sustainable funding pipeline.