How do we run a grant program with a very small team?

A surprising number of corporate foundations run serious budgets with a team of one. A coordinator, maybe a part-time colleague during peak season.

The constraint is never ambition or care. It is hours in the day. And the hours do not go where you would hope. They are consumed by the mechanical parts of the cycle:

• Acknowledging applications.
• Sending reminders.
• Collecting missing documents.
• Formatting a shortlist for sign-off.
• Assembling the year-end report by hand.

The actual mission work, talking to grantees and understanding what is working, gets whatever is left. Which is often very little.

There is also a resilience risk here. When everything runs through one person's manual routine, a holiday or a departure can stall the whole program, and there is no documented process for a replacement to pick up.

The teams that thrive at this size do two things:

1. They standardise intake, so every application arrives complete and comparable, removing the back-and-forth entirely.
2. They automate the repetitive, deadline-driven steps (reminders, status updates, report assembly), so the human time is reserved for judgement and relationships.

The aim is not to do more. It is to stop the program from quietly becoming a second full-time job no one was hired for.