“Now, it’s even trickier because everybody is competing for the very few grants that we have available,” Davis said.
Many students would have been discouraged by this discovery, but not Greenberg. Instead, she had an idea: What if Ohio State students served the Columbus nonprofit community by writing grants? In that moment, Grant Central was born.
“Grant Central exists to start bridging the gap between Ohio State and the many incredible nonprofits in our community,” said Andrew Ghastine, who serves alongside Greenberg as co-president of the organization. “It’s founded on the idea that as students who are passionate about social issues, we can do more for these nonprofits by making them more competitive for grant funding.”
Launched in spring 2025, the organization trains Ohio State students on the principles of grant writing and pairs them with local nonprofits to write for. Grant Central currently has 36 members writing for 11 organizations that span issues from cancer support to environmental protection.
“It’s great to see how many people want to do this kind of work. It’s really interdisciplinary,” said Ghastine, a junior data analytics major. “We have public policy majors and nonprofit or service-oriented students, but we also have pre-med and public health students — really the whole gamut of majors here at Ohio State."
Grant Central accepts applications from students at the beginning of each semester. Upon joining, students receive a four-session grant-writing curriculum designed with guidance from local grant consultants, freelancers and John Glenn College of Public Affairs faculty.
“It was really important to us that we knew what we were talking about. We were very conscious of the fact that we were undergrads designing the program,” Ghastine said. “We conducted a lot of interviews with people from all sides of the grant writing sphere, and we got tips on the resources that they use to train themselves.”
For many of the nonprofits they work with, however, the students are grant experts.
“It’s been wonderful to have a group of folks that are getting the opportunity to learn and use what they’ve learned at Ohio State to benefit small grassroots organizations like mine,” Davis said. “These are organizations that are doing the work down on the ground, but maybe just don’t have the time or know where the grants are.”
To date, Grant Central has secured over $130,000 in funding for their clients, but they say they’re just getting started. Long-term, Greenberg and Ghastine hope to establish a second chapter of the organization for Columbus residents outside the university community to join.
