Two lives, one practice.
A career in insurance leadership. A nonprofit of her own. Both are the reason this work exists.
The best grant writers come from somewhere else first. I came from two.
A career in senior insurance leadership taught me precision and the discipline of writing to a board. Founding a nonprofit of my own taught me what it feels like on the other side of the proposal. Both are the reason this practice exists.
Grant Writing Practitioner
2018 to present. Trained under LaQuetta M. Shamblee, CEO of The Grantbuilder LLC.
Operation Prom National Network
California Director. Founder of the Prom Makeover Initiative, Southern California.
Senior Insurance Leadership
Specialty insurance industry. CPCU, AU-M, AU, and AINS designations.
Top Business Women in San Diego
Nominated, San Diego Insurance Journal, 2024.
Based in Irvine, California · Working nationwide · By referral and direct inquiry
The training I did not know I was getting.
I spent years in senior leadership inside the insurance industry, a career built not on a straight line but on continuous shifting. Roles changed. Teams changed. What I was asked to communicate changed. What stayed constant was that every move required me to learn faster, write clearer, and earn the trust of rooms I had not sat in before.
Writing to boards teaches you to cut the filler. Structuring large dollar proposals teaches you that precision is a form of respect. And elevating yourself through relationships, peer by peer, mentor by mentor, teaches you that sustained credibility is the only credential that actually matters in the long run.
Somewhere in those years I realized two things. First, I loved writing. Second, I had spent my entire adult life giving back in some capacity, and I wanted a way to contribute that used the skills I had spent a career building. Philanthropy was not a new interest. It was the interest that had been waiting for me to finish the training I did not know I was getting.
I take this work seriously because the missions I write for take their work seriously. That has always been the only reason to do it well.
I was a kid who could not afford prom.
I grew up in San Diego and lived there for more than thirty years. I started working at fourteen through EDD summer youth programs and took my first fast food job at sixteen. Every dollar that went toward my prom ticket, my dress, my graduation, I earned myself.
I remembered that.
At the end of 2022, I began searching for a way to give back that actually aligned with something I had lived. A search led me to Operation Prom National Network, a national organization providing prom attire to students who would otherwise go without. I launched the 2023 Prom Makeover in San Diego, and I have continued the Prom Makeover Initiative every year since. Today I serve as the California Director of Operation Prom National Network.
Founding and running the Initiative changed how I see nonprofit work. I stopped being someone who wrote for nonprofits and started being someone who also was one, writing my own grants, reporting my own outcomes, managing my own donors and partners. I learned what it feels like to read a proposal draft at eleven at night and know it is not good enough. I learned what it feels like to receive a grant writer's work and wish I had hired someone else. I learned, most of all, that the people running nonprofits deserve better than what most of them are given.
I wanted to be a grant writer long before I was one.
In 2014 I began studying independently: federal grants, arts funding, individual giving programs, every piece of public literature I could find. What was missing was a practitioner to learn from.
In 2018 I found her. LaQuetta M. Shamblee, Los Angeles based grant writer, trainer, and CEO of The Grantbuilder LLC, became my mentor. I attended her workshops. I joined her Zoom sessions. I read The Grantbuilder cover to cover, sometimes twice. I learned the craft the way a craft should be learned: from someone who had practiced it for decades and was willing to teach it.
I started slowly. A handful of San Diego nonprofits, a raffle format where I gave grassroots organizations one time grant writing services so they could pursue their own funding afterward. I paused the consulting work between 2019 and 2020 while I tended to other things.
And when I returned to it, I returned differently. No longer experimenting, but building something deliberate. I stopped taking whatever came my way and began choosing my clients with intention: organizations whose missions I believed in, whose leaders were ready to do the work, and whose stories deserved to be told in the language funders respect. That is the practice I run today.