Grant Strategist Leslie Wise as a Funding Teacher and Why Most Grant Applications Fail: Misalignment, Not Competition
Middlesex, New Jersey, 26th December 2025, ZEX PR WIRE, In the nonprofit and public-sector funding world, rejection letters often come with a familiar explanation: “highly competitive.” For many organizations, this reinforces a belief that grant success is largely about beating other applicants for scarce dollars. According to Leslie Wise, Founder and Principal Strategist of Wise Grants, this assumption misses the real issue entirely.
“Most grant applications don’t fail because there are too many applicants,” Wise explains. “They fail because the project was never aligned with the funder’s priorities in the first place.”
After more than eight years working closely with nonprofits, municipalities, and for-profit partners across the country, Wise has seen the same pattern repeat itself. Or...
