Most small nonprofits lose grant money by applying to the wrong funders, not by writing badly. This is how to work out which of the 27 open grants are actually worth your evening (last checked 2026-08-13).
Roughly an hour to read and work through. Go to the funding list.
Before anything else: the one-page test
Write down four things about your organization. You will need them for every step below, and if you cannot answer them, no application will succeed either.
- Who you serve, and how many of them last year. A number, not an adjective. "Around 340 Burbank seniors" beats "many local seniors".
- What you spend in a year. Funders sort applicants by budget size more than by anything else.
- Whether you hold 501(c)(3) status yourself, or work through a fiscal sponsor, or neither.
- What the money would pay for, in one sentence, in the order you would spend it.
If number four is "keeping the lights on", say so. That is called general operating support and a shrinking but real group of funders prefer to give it. Dressing it up as a new programme you do not intend to run is how organizations end up trapped delivering something nobody wanted.
The six steps
Rule yourself out fast
Every funder publishes limits, and almost all of them are absolute. Read these before the priorities, because a beautiful fit on mission is worthless if you fail one of these:
- Geography. Does the funder serve Burbank? Los Angeles County is not the same as the City of Los Angeles — several grants on our list fund only projects inside city boundaries, and Burbank is a separate city. If the funder says "City of Los Angeles", you are out.
- Legal status. Most require 501(c)(3) determination. Some accept a fiscal sponsor. Very few fund unincorporated groups.
- Budget floor or ceiling. Some funders will not consider an organization under a certain size — one on our list needs $1.5 million in annual expenses before they will read a first-time application. Others fund only the very smallest groups.
- Age. "Three years of operating history" and "audited financials" are common and non-negotiable.
- What they will not pay for. Endowments, deficits, religious activity, lobbying, individual scholarships and existing debt are the usual exclusions.
Do this in ten minutes per funder. If you fail one hard limit, close the tab. Do not write to ask whether they will make an exception; they will not, and you have used your one introduction badly.
Match on what they fund, not on who they are
A funder's own words about their priorities are the brief. Take their priority page and put it beside your one-page test. You are looking for an overlap you can describe in a single sentence without straining.
A real overlap sounds like: "They fund programmes that keep older adults living independently. We deliver 190 meals a week to homebound Burbank seniors."
A strained one sounds like: "They fund youth development. We run a food pantry, and some of the people in the queue are under eighteen."
If you are writing the second kind, you are about to spend twenty hours losing. The second sentence is also exactly what a programme officer will read it as — they see hundreds of these a year and the reach is obvious from the outside even when it is not from the inside.
Check who they funded last year. Most foundations publish a grantee list, and it tells you far more than the priorities page does. If every grantee is ten times your size, you have your answer.
Sort what is left into three piles
Anything that survives steps one and two goes into one of these. The piles matter because they need completely different amounts of effort.
Apply this month
Open now, you clear every hard limit, the overlap is one clean sentence, and the award is worth the work. Aim for three. Not ten.
Build a relationship first
Good fit, but they take letters of inquiry, invite proposals, or clearly fund people they know. Send a two-paragraph introduction now and apply next cycle.
Diary for later
Closed, or you do not yet meet a limit you could meet in two years. Write the reopening date in your calendar and forget it until then.
Three good applications beat ten rushed ones, every time. A funder can tell within a paragraph whether you wrote for them or pasted from a template, and the tell is usually that you answered a question they did not ask.
Understand what "rolling" and "invitation only" actually mean
- Apply any time (rolling)
- No deadline, but no urgency either — which is why these sit undone for years. Give one a date this month. Decisions often take a full quarter, so apply well before you need the money.
- Letter of inquiry, or LOI
- A short introduction, usually one or two pages, that decides whether you are invited to apply properly. It is a screening step, not a formality. Most of the LA-area foundations worth knowing work this way.
- Invitation only
- They will not read an unsolicited application. This is not a polite discouragement; it is a filing rule. The route in is a board member, a current grantee, or a programme officer who already knows you — which is what pile two is for.
- Match required
- You must raise a share yourself, sometimes dollar for dollar. Check whether volunteer time or donated goods count before you rule it out; often they do.
- Reimbursement
- Common with government grants: you spend first and claim it back, sometimes months later. If your reserves cannot absorb that gap, a large government grant can be genuinely dangerous.
Have these ready before you start writing
Assembling this once turns each application from a fortnight into an afternoon. Keep it in one folder.
- IRS determination letter
- Current year budget, and last year's actuals
- Most recent Form 990
- Board list with roles and affiliations
- Two or three paragraphs of organizational history you can reuse
- Programme description with real numbers served
- Your current funders, and roughly what each gives
- Two or three photographs you have permission to use
- Letters of support from partner organizations
- W-9
The single most common cause of a missed deadline is a document nobody could find at nine o'clock on the night it was due.
Ask for a real number, and say what happens if you get it
Two things separate a fundable request from a hopeful one.
A budget that adds up. Line items, not a round number. $18,400 reads as a plan; $20,000 reads as a guess. Include the unglamorous costs — insurance, mileage, the part-time coordinator — because leaving them out does not make you look lean, it makes the plan look unfinished.
A change you can actually measure. Not "raise awareness". Something like: "140 additional families receive groceries weekly, and we cut the wait from three weeks to five days." If you would not be able to tell in a year whether it happened, neither can they.
If you are turned down, ask why. Many programme officers will tell you, and a specific reason is worth more than the application was. Most funded organizations were declined by that same funder at least once.
Worked example
Invented to show the reasoning, not a real organization.
The group: a Burbank food pantry. $210,000 a year, one part-time paid coordinator, 501(c)(3) since 2019, serves about 400 households a month. They need a replacement refrigerated van, roughly $46,000, and help with the coordinator's salary.
What they do on this site: tick Food & hunger, then Equipment, vehicles or building work. They leave "money only" ticked because a Canva licence does not buy a van.
How the results sort out:
- Ruled out immediately — a foundation needing $1.5m in annual expenses, and a city arts grant limited to projects inside Los Angeles city boundaries. Both fail a hard limit at step one. Thirty seconds each.
- Apply this month — a local service club that gives to established 501(c)(3)s on a rolling basis, and a utility sponsorship programme. Neither will cover the whole van, but two grants of $5,000 and a third of $10,000 make the difference between buying it this year and next.
- Relationship first — a family foundation that funds LA County direct services by letter of inquiry. Right size, right county, right cause. They send two paragraphs this week and expect nothing until the next cycle.
- Diary for later — a recycling grant that reopens in January, and a federal programme that closed in March. Calendar entries, not tasks.
Four hours of work, three applications out, one relationship started, and nothing wasted on the two they could never have won.
Where this list came from, and what it is not
Someone opened each funder's own website and read what it said. Every entry links to the exact page that was read and the date it was read, so you can check rather than trust. Where a page did not state a deadline or say clearly who could apply, the entry says so instead of guessing.
It is still not complete, and it is not advice about your organization. Burbank Cares is a directory, not a grant consultant. If something here is wrong or out of date, please tell us — that is the fastest way it gets fixed.