We interview Libby Hikind, CEO and founder of GrantWatch.com and GratnWriterTeam.com about what nonprofits need to know about applying for grants.
 
About Libby Hikind
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Libby Hikind is the Founder and CEO of GrantWatch.com, the leading grant funding search engine for nonprofits, businesses, and individuals. Libby holds a post master’s degree in Educational Administration and Supervision and is a wife, mother, grandmother, and great grandmother. 
 
Libby is often referred to as the "Queen of Grants." Libby opened GrantWatch in 2010 after retiring from her 29+ years as a teacher with the New York City Department of Education. While teaching, Libby wrote grants for her special education classroom, mainstream education and business careers, computers, and entrepreneurship classroom. For two years, Libby worked as a grant writer for an NYC Dept of Ed Brooklyn school district raising $11 million.
 
After which time, Libby returned to teaching and opened her own grant writing agency in 1994. Libby Hikind is a national grants expert. From 1999 to 2001, Libby created NYCGrantWatch, a faxed grant newsletter publication for her nonprofit client organizations. Libby took a sabbatical to run for city council and is well known for her successful primary election campaign for New York’s City Council (2001) for which she received an endorsement from The New York Times. Following September 11th, Libby volunteered at Ground Zero, where she gained recognition as a FEMA Project Liberty Crisis Counselor and Team Leader. Libby is credited for more than 46,000 children receiving health insurance, as a result of her coalition building of nonprofits and writing the first Staten Island Child Health Plus proposal. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Rough Transcript:
[00:00:00] Well, this week on the podcast we have Libby hn, the C e o and Founder at Grant Watch and grant writer team. So Grant watch and grant writer team, and I came across them because frankly, , you have to, if you are looking in and around the grant world, you run into, uh, these organizations. And Libby, thank you for taking the time to sit down with us and just talk to us about all things grant writing, grant trends, because even though it says nonprofits at the head of everyone's organization, we care a lot about profits when it comes to making money.
[00:01:02] And grants are a big funding source. Thank you for joining. Thank you for inviting me. Appreciate it. Well, maybe in your own words, can you explain what Grant Watch does? Well, grant Watch is a grant search engine that lists the grants that are available for non-profits, municipalities, businesses, and individuals.
[00:01:30] We have over 60 categories of grant. That the way we categorize grants on, on the right side of the website, you can use a keyword search and find them as well. And we add new grants every week and we archive the grants as they come do. So really Grant watch is all about currently available grants and that's great.
[00:01:53] And you, um, looks like founded it in 2010. So you have . Successfully survived over a decade of operation, which is rare air and certainly has my respect for anyone who can, uh, build for that long. Thank you. We've been through many economies.
[00:02:11] I think that's important too, because I think if you have a short timeframe, you're like, oh, times have only been good. And then you have covid and you're like, times have only been bad, and you're like, times are gonna do what times do. I'm curious though, you're, you're mentioning, you know, what's going on in the economy.
[00:02:26] How do you see that impacting the grant market in general? Well, I think more and more people are gonna be looking for grants. Uh, they're gonna be looking for funding. And with what happened over the weekend with the, the banks, uh, I got a lot of notices that some good funders had their money in that bank in, well, s s uh, Silicon Valley, right?
[00:02:53] And yeah, svb, right? So that's, you know,