From Zero to Funded: How Small Cities Are Finally Winning Grants

By Polco on July 25, 2025

Polco Blog - From Zero to Funded How Small Cities Are Finally Winning Grants

How Small Teams Are Solving the Grant Writing Crunch Without Hiring a Grant Writer

In 2025, billions in federal, state, and philanthropic grants are available to local governments—but many cities never see a dime. Why? Because they’re too small, too swamped, or too under-resourced to go after them.

One city manager summed it up perfectly: “We have one person doing finance, HR, and city clerk duties. Writing grants? That’s just not realistic.”

The Pain Is Real: When Staff Shortages Meet Grant Fatigue

Small and mid-sized communities often operate with skeleton crews. That means:

No full-time grant writer
No time to scan FOAs or RFPs
No capacity to align data with funding criteria
No bandwidth to track outcomes or complete reports

So what happens? Cities leave tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table every year. At a time when budgets are strained, that’s not just unfortunate, it’s unsustainable.

We Reviewed Hundreds of Small Communities. Here’s What They Needed:

We studied how communities like yours struggle with the grant process and identified the top needs:

Matchmaking between project ideas and available funding
Drafting support for proposals, narratives, and need statements
Built-in data to justify need and demonstrate impact
Time savings: doing in hours what used to take weeks

In short: they didn’t need another software tool. They needed a smart, fast teammate who understands government grants.

Enter Grace: AI That Writes Like a Grant Pro

Meet Grace, your AI grant assistant built into Polco. Grace helps staff:

Automatically draft grant narratives using your local data
Generate persuasive need statements with embedded survey results
Match grant opportunities to your most urgent projects
Track outcomes and reporting requirements in one place

Unlike generic AI tools, Grace is trained specifically on local government language, funding priorities, and benchmarking data.

The Hidden Value: You Already Have What Funders Want

If you’ve run The National Community Survey™ (The NCS), CASOA, or any other benchmark survey, you're already sitting on gold:

Validated resident input
Equity and inclusion data
Quality-of-life metrics linked to national goals

Grace uses this data as fuel by automatically turning it into compelling evidence for your funding requests.

Final Thought: Free Money Shouldn’t Be This Hard

Small teams don’t lack ideas. They lack time, staff, and bandwidth. Grace bridges that gap.

In 2025, the difference between a funded project and a missed opportunity often comes down to who can move fastest—not who has the biggest staff. You don't need a grant department. You just need to give your current team a serious upgrade.