How We Turned A Staff Crisis Into An Opportunity

Stone Soup Cafe, a $750K community meal program in Western Massachusetts, faced what looked like a devastating blow in early 2025: their experienced grants director left just as federal funding dried up and foundation budgets tightened across the country.

Executive Director Kirsten Levitt had built something special—a 14-year-old organization serving thousands through pay-what-you-can meals and emergency food services, run entirely by a skeleton crew of part-timers. But losing their grants expertise during the worst funding climate in decades felt like a potential crisis.

Six months later, they're not just surviving—they're thriving. They turned a terrible situation into an opportunity to experiment with new approaches, and it paid off. Their reimagined grants operation is outputting the same volume of applications while freeing up significant budget for direct service delivery.

The twist: Sometimes the best innovations come from having to think differently about old problems.

The Perfect Storm

The departure came at the worst possible time. Stone Soup had just scaled from a $125K organization to three-quarters of a million dollars over five years. Federal grants were getting slashed. Local foundations were overwhelmed with applications from desperate nonprofts.

"I have 12 people who work for me and they're all part-timers," Levitt recalls. "Nobody got a COLA this year. The last thing I wanted to do was explain to the board why we needed to hire another expensive full-time position."

The organization was caught between impossible choices: maintain their grant application volume with expensive new hires, or watch their funding pipeline collapse.

The Pivot

Instead of hiring, Levitt decided to experiment with a different approach entirely. She partnered with GrantLoop, an AI system specifically designed for nonprofit grant writing, paying a fraction of what a full-time grants director would cost.

The skepticism was immediate. "We're talking about writers who very highly value their craft," she notes. Her remaining grants team worried about losing the human touch that made their applications successful.

But sometimes the best solutions emerge when you're forced to think creatively about old challenges.

The Breakthrough

GrantLoop didn't replace human expertise—it opened up new possibilities. The system could prospect dozens of opportunities overnight and generate complete first drafts in under an hour, but the real value came from how it enhanced what the team was already good at.

"I want to be on the cutting edge," Levitt explains. "I want people to know that we're willing to try new things in order to make our community better."

Rather than replacing their approach, the partnership allowed them to experiment with expanded capacity:

• Prospecting breakthrough: Harper could research 100+ opportunities and rank them by fit in a single request

• Draft acceleration: First drafts that used to take days now took minutes

• Strategic focus: Human writers could spend their time on relationship-building and refinement rather than starting from scratch

The Numbers

Before the transition:

• Full-time equivalent grants director: ~$50K+ annually

• Application volume: Constrained by capacity

• Win rate: Strong but limited by volume

After the new approach:

• AI system cost: $10K annually ($850/month)

• Application volume: Same output with reduced personnel costs

• Budget savings: $40K+ redirected to programs

• Team satisfaction: Higher (less repetitive work, more strategy)

The organization maintained their application quality and win rates while dramatically reducing overhead costs.

Beyond Survival

The experiment revealed something valuable: what looked like a devastating loss was actually an opportunity to rethink their approach to grants work entirely.

The AI system helped them explore new ways of describing their impact and reaching different types of funders. The technology wasn't about replacing human insight—it was about giving their small team the capacity to pursue opportunities that would have been impossible before.

For their grants team: More time for strategic thinking and relationship-building. For Levitt: More bandwidth for organizational leadership rather than managing every draft. For the organization: Proof that creative problem-solving could turn constraints into competitive advantages.

The Broader Lesson

Stone Soup's story illustrates a counterintuitive truth: sometimes losing key personnel forces organizations to discover more efficient ways of operating.

"I'd rather be on the cutting edge," Levitt reflects. "I want to be able to say next year in our impact report that we worked with developers on cutting-edge technology to hone our development plan."

Their crisis became a case study in adaptive resilience—not just surviving disruption, but using it as a catalyst for operational improvement.

The Takeaway

When external pressures threaten nonprofit sustainability, the solution isn't always hiring more people. Sometimes it's reimagining how work gets done.

Stone Soup turned a potential catastrophe into competitive advantage: same grant output, lower costs, more strategic focus, and a team that's spending time on relationship-building rather than administrative tasks.

For small nonprofits facing similar pressures: the path forward might not be expansion—it might be intelligent automation that lets you do more with the passionate team you already have.

Founded in 2010, Stone Soup Cafe operates community meals, an emergency food pantry, and maintains over 500 volunteers annually. Their "everybody's welcome" philosophy extends from their kitchen to their technology adoption—always willing to experiment if it serves their community better.