Grants Manager

Grants Manager

The purpose of the Grants Manager at Zearn is to ensure our philanthropic funding against strategic investments are managed with absolute rigor, which includes effective communication back to the philanthropic organizations on how their support is enabling Zearn to achieve its organizational goals and pursue its mission to make all kids math kids.

This role is critical to sustaining Zearn's growth as we enter a new phase of scale focused on driving Zearn implementation and impact on math achievement. Reporting to the Director of Strategic Projects, you will be the primary engine for grant execution and the lead day to day contact for our program officers. You will manage grant commitments, optimize management processes, and craft compelling donor communications that clearly convey how philanthropic support helps all kids love and learn math.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

Manage funder relationships and proactive reporting for strategic grants ensuring Zearn is viewed as a highly organized and trusted partner by our program officers.

• Act as the primary point of contact for program officers, managing day to day communications and responding to inquiries with professional maturity.
• Partner with the Director of Strategic Projects and CEO to develop concept notes, strategic briefs, and funder-facing narratives for new and expanding grant opportunities.
• Own the reporting lifecycle for a small number of high dollar, multi-year grants, ensuring every deliverable is submitted with high-quality and ahead of schedule.
• Lead the writing for bimonthly, quarterly, and annual funder reports, translating complex product and implementation data into clear narratives.
• Anticipate funder questions before they are asked, preparing the Director of Strategic Projects, CEO, and executive leadership team with the data and talking points needed for high-stakes check-ins.
• Maintain visibility into Zearn's current and prospective strategic grants, helping forecast upcoming reporting, proposal, and funding milestones to support long-term planning and strategic decision-making.
• Manage the grant application process for new strategic opportunities, coordinating inputs from cross-functional teams to ensure all submissions reflect Zearn's collective impact.

Operationalize cross functional project management across the grant lifecycle to provide internal teams with the clarity and lead time they need to meet every commitment.

• Drive transparency and accountability across the grant lifecycle by tracking commitments, identifying risks early, and ensuring internal teams have the lead time necessary to resolve blockers.
• Establish and manage scalable operating infrastructure to streamline grant coordination and maintain high standards of execution across the organization.
• Collaborate with Finance to ensure grant spending and budgets are tracked accurately against funder requirements.
• Develop and maintain a content library of standard narratives and data points to streamline reporting and proposal development.
• Create and maintain a rigorous grants procedure manual and documentation system to maximize cross-team efficiency and ensure accuracy for compliance requirements.
• Audit and maintain the fidelity of grant records in the CRM, ensuring that every interaction, deadline, and reporting obligation is documented as the organization's source of truth.

Effectively communicate how philanthropic support is advancing Zearn's strategic goals, ensuring funders clearly understand the progress, impact, and learning enabled by their investment, and enabling our funders to recognize the strategic intent behind our work and its role in improving math outcomes.

• Build deep familiarity with Zearn's strategic goals and platform to ensure our reporting reflects the strategic intent behind our work, not just a list of tasks.
• Coordinate with cross-functional teams to gather raw data and layer on the strategic context that makes our impact resonate with sophisticated philanthropic partners.
• Ensure all external communications reflect a strategic understanding of Zearn's mission, even when the underlying work is tactical or procedural.
• Synthesize learnings and trends from current grants to identify opportunities for strategic narrative shifts that elevate Zearn's positioning with sophisticated philanthropic partners.

The Next Problems for this Role to Solve:

• How do we build a reporting cadence that feels proactive rather than reactive for our most complex multi-year grants?
• What is the most efficient way to gather qualitative impact stories from across the organization without creating friction for other teams?
• How can we use AI tools to automate the tactical parts of reporting so more time can be spent on strategic narrative and data analysis?
• How do we systematically capture learnings from individual grants to synthesize patterns across the full portfolio, surfacing the strategic narrative shifts that elevate Zearn's positioning with funders?

Skills You Bring to the Table:

• Reporting Powerhouse: You have a specific expertise in grantee report outs and a passion for translating technical work into funder narratives.
• Dots Connector: You have the intellectual curiosity to understand the "why" behind the work and you actively shape how that thinking gets translated into strategy documents and funder narratives, not just execute against a brief.
• Execution Rigor: You thrive on hitting milestones and ensuring no detail is missed in a fast moving environment.
• Relationship Owner: You are comfortable being the face of an organization to external partners, managing communications with professional maturity and proactivity.
• Operational Empathy: You know how to get what you need from busy cross functional teams by being organized, clear, and helpful.
• Evidence Based Storyteller: You are comfortable with data and use it to build trust with funders.

Potential Markers of these Skills:

• 4-6+ years of experience in grant management or project management, with a heavy emphasis on reporting and execution (ideally in the nonprofit or edtech sector).
• Prior experience as a grantee with a focus on managing report-outs to funders, rather than experience coming solely from the grant-making or foundation side.
• Exceptional writing and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to synthesize technical information into clear narratives for program officers or clients.
• Demonstrated experience coordinating complex, multi-stakeholder projects with many moving parts and cross-functional inputs.
• Technical proficiency in data analysis, basic financial tracking (budgets/spend), and the use of AI tools to accelerate coordination and writing.
• Bachelor's Degree in a related field.
• Familiarity with compliance structures of large national philanthropic foundations.

This is an Individual Contributor role.

• Title: Grants Manager
• Reports to: Director of Strategic Projects

How We Work:

• We aim to create a numeracy movement. This is no easy feat, and no one of us can solve this on our own. Given that, Zearn is a transparent, collaborative, and open-to-feedback culture.
• Our work is often collaborative in nature:
• We own our deliverables in close collaboration with others
• We communicate openly, and share early thinking and drafts often
• We seek ways to create and improve systems, and work with each other to contribute thinking in both asynchronous and synchronous discussions.
• We create a sense of community through regularly sharing context so we can collectively solve problems to drive Zearn's velocity.

Location:

This role is remote and can be performed in any of the following states/locations: CA, CT, FL, IL, LA, MA, MD, NC, NJ, NY, OH, OR, PA, TN, TX, VA, WA, WI and Washington D.C.

Compensation & Benefits:

The compensation range for this role is $80,000 - $100,000 per year. We offer a competitive benefits package, including comprehensive medical, dental and vision plans, short- and long-term disability, life insurance, 401K matching, parental leave, and a flexible PTO policy. We also offer a collegial and passionate culture and the potential to positively impact the lives of millions of children.