Alex Walker's daughter once asked her if she was taking PTO. Alex laughed and said no, because she was already driving her kid around at three in the afternoon. That is the trade a mompreneur makes. Room mom and den mom by day, grant writer by night after bedtime. Alex sits down with Sam to talk about building Green Desk Grant Writing, the community she lost when a women's co-working space closed, and how she turned 15 years inside nonprofits into a business that has landed over 22 million dollars for clients.
What You'll Hear
- Why Alex calls herself a mompreneur and what the term actually looks like on a Wednesday afternoon
- The Kansas City women's co-working space that closed, and what childcare has to do with it
- A Boy Scouts search and rescue call on Baldy that turned from an asthma attack into a head injury
- How 15 years across nonprofits, foundations, and for-profit grant writing led Alex to go solo
- Over 22 million dollars raised in three years, including a 7 million dollar year
- What a grant actually is, what strings come with it, and why 90 percent of funders have no website
- Why late May through August is the window for small businesses to chase grants
- The advice from her first boss out of college that has stuck with her ever since
What a mompreneur actually is
Alex didn't coin the word mompreneur, but she lives it. She picked it up through Innovate Her KC, working alongside a bunch of other women running businesses and parenting at the same time. The term captures something that is harder than it sounds. You are not a mom who happens to work. You are not an entrepreneur who happens to have kids. You are the ultimate hybrid of both, and the two never sit still at the same time.
She tells the story of her kid asking if she was going to take PTO the way dad had. Alex pointed out that it was three in the afternoon and she was already driving him around. Being your own boss meant she could be room mom for holiday parties, run field day at the end of the school year, and show up as den mom for Cub Scouts. It also meant she was working after everybody went to bed.
Sam brings up an older woman in a business meeting who once told him that when she was young, a pregnant working woman was expected to hide the pregnancy and act like nothing had happened. Alex doesn't sugarcoat where things are now. Culturally, she says, we haven't fully come out of that. Other mompreneurs get it. Most clients still expect five star service, which is fair, and the mom guilt is real when a six year old discovers that mom being on Zoom is the single most interesting thing in the house.
Childcare, community, and the co-working space that closed
The moment Alex lost childcare as she was getting started, she almost shut her business down. Grant writing is high level brain work. Artfully describing a nonprofit's mission or a small business's fabric is not something you do with a three year old on deck. She names the Kansas City specific problem bluntly. During COVID, around 250 childcare centers in the metro closed and never reopened. That shortage is still squeezing parents who are trying to run anything.
She talks about a co-working space in the West Bottoms that she loved. Old factory brick, hardwood floors, coffee and tarot, letter-writing events during elections, quiet rooms for Zoom calls. It was first an all-women space and then a gender minority space. Her own kid used to come along and liked it. The space closed because the same pressures that hit the mompreneurs using it also hit the entrepreneur running it. Rent in downtown Kansas City kept climbing. Childcare costs on top of rent made the math impossible.
What Alex lost with that space was not just a desk. It was community. She names loneliness as a real part of the mompreneur experience and says finding pockets of community, even if that sometimes means stepping out to a Starbucks to get an hour of quiet, has been a survival skill. Starting another co-working space like the one that closed is on her list of things she would love to do someday.
Grant writing for nonprofits and small businesses
Alex has been in the nonprofit space for 15 years. Grant writing, relationship building, volunteer recruitment, strategic planning, capital campaigns. Across roles at the Boy Scouts, the YMCA in Salina as director of member and donor relations, a Kansas City foundation where she learned the funder side, and Emmanuel Child Development Center as chief development officer, she kept running into the same wall. Every employer only wanted one slice of what she could do.
Green Desk Grant Writing was her way of using the whole toolbox. She writes grants, yes. She also builds the relationships with funders, searches for grants off the beaten path that not many people are applying for, runs capital campaigns for brick and mortar projects, and helps nonprofits and small businesses translate their vision into fundable plans. Three years in as of this June, she has landed more than 22 million dollars in funding for her clients. The last year alone was a 7 million dollar year.
One of her rules shows up in almost every conversation. Qualify yourself for the grant before you start writing. Her second rule is almost as important. Actually follow the directions and answer every part of every question. She describes sitting on a committee once as a reviewer and Sam echoes it. A beautiful applicant can lose to a less deserving one simply because they missed a line item on the criteria. The work is detail work.
What a grant actually is, and where to look
Because there is so much mythology around the word grant, Alex spends real time defining it. A grant is funding given by a foundation, a corporate foundation, or sometimes a government entity, to an organization or person to do a specific task. It is not free money. Every application asks what you will do with the funding, and if you are awarded you have to spend it on what you said. Misspend it and you give it back. That is different from a loan, where you pay it back no matter what, but grants are not strings free.
She points out that 90 percent of funders don't have a website. That surprises a lot of people who assume Google can surface every opportunity. The real tools are things like Foundation Directory Online, Foundation Search, and GrantStation for paid databases, and ProPublica for free access to 990s. Page 10 of a 990 tells you whether that foundation accepts outside applications and how to apply.
She also corrects a common misread. Nonprofits have a wider pool of grants to apply for, but for-profit small businesses are not shut out. The timing matters. Q1 and part of Q2 is when big foundations fund smaller entrepreneur-minded foundations. Those smaller foundations then turn around and fund small businesses from late May through August. If you are a small business owner listening in spring, she says, the window is about to open and you should have your ear to the ground.
When free resources run out, a professional grant searcher or grant writer can build an opportunities list and a grants calendar. That is literally what Alex sold to her first clients when she went solo. Grants calendar by date, priority, and program. They paid her for her time each month to write against it.
Boy Scouts, Baldy, and the pull toward nonprofits
Before grant writing, Alex wanted to be a writer. Family talked her out of it the way people get talked out of wanting to be a magician. You'll never make money. Fifteen years later, she is making money writing, and making other people a lot of money doing it. In between, she chased her second love, wildlife, and did search and rescue for the Boy Scouts in New Mexico.
She tells Sam one story in particular. A call came in on a mountain called Baldy, a peak named for the fact that no trees grow at the top. The report was an asthma attack. She and her two person team, a ranger on maps and a fourth year medical student from KU on drugs, hiked up with 90 pound advanced life support packs. Halfway up, an adult hiker passing by casually corrected the call. The kid had not had an asthma attack. He had hit his head on a boulder jumping between rocks.
A head injury requires a 12 person carry team they did not have. Baldy gets a storm every day around noon. The peak is dense with metal ore, so lightning hits the top of it over and over. As the clouds darkened and the rumbles started, the scouts had already begun walking their kid down, and her team met him on the trail. There was no time for stitches. They packed the wound with gauze and moved. He was okay. That shift ran seven hours. Her boss pulled her off the next call.
That work did two things. It gave her a taste of adventure she still lights up talking about. It also taught her that nonprofits create the outlet for that kind of meaningful work. When she became an executive with the Boy Scouts later, she started doing volunteer recruitment, running camperees, and running her first grant writes. The nonprofit pull started there.
Going solo, coaching color guard, and always be interviewing
Alex didn't launch Green Desk Grant Writing from zero. She had spent years putting herself out in the community, having coffees, doing workshops, showing up to lunches with other development officers. Word traveled. By the time she was ready to give notice, CEOs in her network already wanted to hire her. She left with clients lined up.
Her offering has grown since. She writes grants, builds cases for support, and writes comprehensive 14 page business plans for new small businesses that double as a foundation for future grant applications. She runs a quarterly workshop, about 90 minutes long, that walks people through setting a mission, vision, and values statement, defining outcomes versus outputs, understanding that capital to a funder means brick and mortar rather than cash, and finding grants using free resources. Attendees usually leave either ready to hire her or empowered to do it themselves. She treats both as a win.
Going solo is not all upside. The feast or famine cycle of entrepreneurship, she says, is no joke, and it still sometimes scares her. What it bought her is the ability to be present with her kids and to coach color guard, which she loves. Coaching is the boots on the ground counterweight to the spreadsheet work of grants. She calls those three things, her kids, her clients, and coaching, the three things that matter most to her.
Asked for a guiding rule, she points to her first boss out of college, Ross Munt, who told her on day one, always be interviewing. Not in the job-hunting sense. In the sense that you never know who is in the room. A client today could be a coworker or a boss tomorrow. Sam adds his own version from a recent Eureka moment. No one knows who you are until you tell them. Alex nods. You could be the king or queen of Wales, but if you don't say so, no one has a clue.
About Alex Walker
Alex is the owner of Green Desk Grant Writing, a Kansas City firm that helps nonprofits and small businesses land funding through grant writing, grant search, capital campaigns, and strategic planning. She spent 15 years in the nonprofit sector across the Boy Scouts, the YMCA in Salina, a Kansas City foundation, and Emmanuel Child Development Center before going solo three years ago. She has raised more than 22 million dollars for her clients and also coaches color guard.