How One Nonprofit Tripled Its Grant Funding With AI

For years, the team at Rising Roots — a youth mentorship nonprofit serving Atlanta’s southside — lost grants for the same reason: they didn’t have time to write them. With two full-time staff and a hundred kids to serve, applications got rushed or skipped entirely.

Then program director Marcus Bell attended a free community workshop on practical AI. “I walked in thinking it was hype,” he admits. “I walked out with a system.”

Building a repeatable process

Marcus didn’t use AI to write grants for him. He used it to do the parts that always stalled the team: turning their messy notes into clear outcome statements, tailoring a base proposal to each funder’s priorities, and catching gaps before submission.

The results compounded fast. Rising Roots submitted four times as many applications and won funding that grew their annual budget from $40,000 to $130,000.

“AI didn’t replace our story,” Marcus says. “It gave us the time to tell it well.”

The bigger pattern

Marcus’s experience reflects a theme we see constantly: the organizations that benefit most from AI aren’t the most technical — they’re the ones who pair the tools with a clear mission. It’s the same principle behind Micah Berkley’s work as #TheAIMogul: technology is leverage, but only when it’s pointed at something that matters.

Rising Roots now runs its own AI onboarding for new volunteers. “It’s part of the job now,” Marcus says. “Like email used to be.”

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