Grant Scout

Inspiration

Small community organizations — food banks, libraries, after-school programs — lose real money not because writing grant applications is hard, but because finding the few they can actually win is a slow, manual slog through thousands of listings most of them are ineligible for. There are ~4M unique federal grant awards on record and 80K+ live opportunity listings at any time (grants.gov), but a volunteer board with 6 hours a month to spend on grant-seeking cannot manually triage that. We wanted an agent that turns "we should apply for grants sometime" into an actual, actionable short list every cycle.

What it does

Grant Scout takes a one-time org profile (mission, budget, states, focus area, available volunteer hours) and runs the busywork end to end:

1. Searches grants.gov's live public API for open/forecasted opportunities matching the org.
2. Cross-checks each promising hit against real historical award data (derived from USASpending.gov) to see whether nonprofits like this org actually win that program, and at what real dollar amount — not a guess.
3. Weighs the application effort against the payoff, against the org's stated volunteer capacity.
4. Surfaces at most 3 opportunities with an honest brief (fit, real $ range, deadline, one risk) — or says plainly that nothing cleared the bar. It does not pad the list.

It's for any small 501(c)(3) or community organization without a grant-writing department — food banks, food pantries, libraries, small local nonprofits, community health orgs, school programs run by volunteer boards. See sample_run_food_bank.md in the repo for a full, real (not scripted) run, plus three more against differently-shaped orgs.

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

What's next for Grant Scout

Built With

• strands