Children’s Literacy Initiative is a national leader in early childhood education that Fairmount first worked with in 2009, when the American Recovery Act launched what was then known as the Investing in Innovation (i3) funding stream within the Department of Education. Fairmount worked closely with the CLI team to win $20M to scale the organization’s work nationally. Since then, Fairmount has worked with CLI every few years on complex and transformational federal grant applications, ultimately helping the organization secure another $20M to establish regional hubs in several geographic locations, thereby shoring up its ability to scale nationally.
During these years, Fairmount has worked with several CLI leadership teams, and in a variety of capacities that reflect our overall approach to helping organizations pursue public sector support. In some cases, Fairmount has been “all-in”, playing the roles of strategist, project manager, writer, and attachment developer, providing comprehensive support at every step in the process. In other cases, Fairmount has served as a critical reviewer, providing CLI with strategic framing points for the narrative and a comprehensive workplan at the outset of the engagement, and later providing several rounds of critical feedback once the organization had drafted its narrative.
More recently, Fairmount’s support has coached and trained the CLI team in how to develop federal grant applications and in conducting a comprehensive forecasting process to help the organization plan several years in advance for funding opportunities it knows it will want to pursue.
Throughout all of our work, which has resulted in over $40M of additional resources, Fairmount has seamlessly blended our dual role as expert strategist and detailed project manager, asked provocative questions to help CLI articulate its value proposition more effectively, and challenged and engaged the team to develop defensible, competitive ideas that advance its strategic goals. In so doing, our efforts have added distinct value by our ability to elegantly manage fast, complex projects and create high-quality, effective, and winning deliverables.