I’ve shared my ‘why’ story of becoming a grant consultant many moons ago. Now I want to tell you the stories about the people and the places I met along the way, and the twists and turns of life that brought me to them. This is the first story in the “working with nonprofit executive director stories” series.
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Early in my consulting career, I knew I wanted to connect with organizations doing really meaningful community development work. Reading through my filtered idealist.org job postings, an unusual post caught my eye.
A new nonprofit called Design Impact had posed the question; corporations utilize design thinking to assess market interest, gauge user feedback and test and refine products and services before they ever hit the market--WHAT IF nonprofits could have access to this iterative process in developing solutions to community needs?
This was 2011, and design thinking was largely a luxury only affordable to corporate and well-resourced entities.
I was lucky to meet Kate Hanisian and Ramsey Ford as they were in the beginning stages of testing out their vision of “embedding” design thinking within two community nonprofits in South India.
As co-founders, Kate served as the executive director and Ramsey as the design director.
The first initiative used the design-thinking process to develop a smokeless charcoal briquette to combat indoor air pollution (a widespread problem in communities using indoor fuel-burning stoves).
The second was a fair-trade soap product, made by local women using natural ingredients including industrial ‘waste’ bi-products. The soap was also packed using upcycled material.
I found this concept of embedded-design fascinating, and I was excited to be a part of making this vision scalable.
As the team’s grant writer, my job was to work with Kate to find funders willing to get behind this work and share the Design Impact vision of making design-thinking available and widely accessible—so that nonprofits could also create products, services and processes that were user-designed, market-tested, and responded to real-time needs.
Anyone who knows Kate and Ramsey will tell you that they are hugely talented, highly-skilled, passionate and dedicated professionals bringing years of nonprofit and human-centered and product design experience to the table.
But when it came to fundraising for DI we were building the plane as it was flying.
With invaluable admin and design support upholding everything we did, we re-wrote the website copy, created talking points, published a visually stunning annual report, created a service brochure, and ran a week-long giving campaign.
Many of these things were a professional ‘first’ for me. Way outside my experience as a grants professional.
Thinking back, it was my inexperience that gave me the audacity to try things that I would caution any nonprofit against doing today.
Like applying for a federal grant in Design Impact’s first year.
Here’s the kicker—we won!
The grant award gave Design Impact the ability to place five American designers within a host organization in India; to live in the community, and to design a solution alongside the nonprofit to address pressing local needs including child nutrition, safe environments and healthcare.
This was a catalytic experience which laid the foundation for DI’s work which redirected its shift to working in US communities.
Over the next 16 years the organization partnered on over 400 distinct social design projects and engaged over 20,000 nonprofit leaders, community members and creatives.
Design Impacted elected to pause active operations in 2026.
Looking back, my partnership with DI in its first four years (and my exit as I felt the organization no longer needed my support) was also catalytic in my own life, as it affirmed my passion to help resource nonprofits supporting their local communities.
This is the work I continue to do today—as I reflect on my partnership with DI, I recognize my privilege of being a part of a story much bigger than myself.