About This Partnership
The Atlanta Youth Tennis & Education Foundation came to us with something many nonprofits have, but rarely recognize as an asset: a compelling mission, a proven program model, and funders in the region who were predisposed to care about what they do. What AYTEF didn’t have was a system. Grant writing services for youth nonprofits sometimes looks like, no grant calendar, no funder tracking, no shared language between the development function and the board — just real potential that wasn’t translating into revenue.
That gap is more common than most organizations want to admit. Strong programs and strong grant outcomes are not the same thing. Closing the distance between them is a matter of infrastructure, strategy, and timing — which is exactly where we focus our work. When AYTEF engaged Resurgens Impact Consulting, the ask was simple on the surface: help us raise more money. But the real work was about what it means to be grant-ready — and building the organizational foundation that makes sustained grant success possible.
What follows is the story of that work: where AYTEF started, what we built together, and why the results held.
Atlanta Youth Tennis & Education Foundation (AYTEF) is a Metro Atlanta-based nonprofit that enriches the lives of underserved youth through free and low-cost tennis and education programs. By the end of 2024, AYTEF recognized that its funding model needed to evolve to keep pace with its vision for youth success. The organization had limited experience developing funder relationships and only a few written governance policies in place – a common indicator of organizational capacity for funders. Leadership knew there was a wealth of grant resources they were not yet tapping into and that they were not fully grant-ready, but they lacked a clear roadmap for diversifying funding and proactively seeking new opportunities.
AYTEF initially engaged Resurgens Impact Consulting (RIC) in Spring 2025 for support on individual grant opportunities and a grant strategy assessment, later formalizing a one-year consulting partnership in September 2025. Led by Senior Grant Consultant Johanna St. John, RIC conducted an organizational assessment focused on grant readiness and competitiveness, resulting in clear action steps to strengthen AYTEF’s foundation for sustained grant growth. RIC also completed an analysis of the funding landscape and designed a calendar of good-fit opportunities aligned with AYTEF’s mission, timing, and capacity.
The partnership emphasized practical, relationship-centered implementation. RIC advised AYTEF on concrete actions to initiate and deepen connections with new funder prospects and built relationship-tracking tools to monitor outreach, cultivation, and stewardship. A recurring “cultivation week” each month focused staff efforts on funder engagement, while new governance policies reinforced funder confidence in AYTEF’s leadership and oversight.
Within a year of launching the formal partnership, AYTEF saw meaningful gains in both revenue and resilience. Grant revenue increased by 13% in 2025—with $100,000 secured from three new funders that offer strong potential for long-term relationships—and AYTEF achieved a 66% win rate on local grants, significantly outperforming typical industry averages that often range from approximately 10-30%. This case illustrates RIC’s expertise in empowering youth-serving organizations to transform latent grant potential into strategic, long-term funding capacity.
What This Means for Your Organization
AYTEF’s results — a 13% increase in grant revenue, $100,000 from three new funders, and a 66% win rate in a field where 10–30% is the norm — didn’t happen because we found a magic funder or wrote a perfect proposal. They happened because the organization did the harder, slower work first. The readiness assessment surfaced gaps that would have quietly undermined every application. The opportunity calendar turned reactive grant-chasing into a deliberate, forward-looking process. And the governance policies gave funders something increasingly rare to see: an organization that could demonstrate it was ready to be trusted with significant investment.
The transferable lesson is this: grant revenue scales when grant infrastructure scales with it. Most organizations skip the foundation because it feels like overhead. But the infrastructure — the tracking tools, the cultivation rhythms, the board engagement, the policies — is what turns a one-time win into a reliable funding stream. AYTEF’s 66% win rate wasn’t luck. It was the downstream result of upstream decisions.
The second lesson is about relationships. Monthly cultivation week — a structured period dedicated entirely to funder communication, not proposal writing — was one of the highest-leverage moves we made together. Funders don’t give to organizations they don’t know. Creating consistent, non-transactional touchpoints before any application goes out changes how your proposals land. The third: governance matters to funders now more than it used to. Boards that are engaged, policies that are documented, and financial practices that are clean have become baseline expectations in a more competitive landscape. Getting those in place isn’t just responsible management — it’s a competitive advantage.
If you’re in a similar position to where AYTEF started — strong mission, real potential, and a development operation that hasn’t caught up yet — we’d like to talk. Schedule a free consultation and we’ll take a clear-eyed look at where you are and what it would take to get you where you want to go.
