Director, Grants Management in Detroit, Michigan at Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan

The Director, Grants Management provides strategic and operational leadership for the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan’s grants management function. This role is responsible for establishing and maintaining the systems, standards, workflows, and team capacity necessary to support effective, compliant, and customer-focused grantmaking across the organization.

The Director oversees how grants move through the organization from due diligence and application through award processing, reporting, and closeout. The position works in close partnership with Community Impact, Donor Services, Finance, Technology Services, and Foundation leadership to ensure grantmaking operations are efficient, consistent, compliant, and responsive to organizational needs.

This role is responsible for building and strengthening a high-performing grants management function, developing staff, creating operational consistency, and driving continuous improvement across grantmaking processes and systems.

About the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan (CFSEM):
The Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan was established in 1984 to ensure residents in Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Monroe, Washtenaw, Livingston and St. Clair counties can thrive. As a permanent community endowment built by gifts from thousands of individuals and organizations, the Community Foundation supports a variety of activities benefiting economic opportunity, health equity, youth and education, arts and culture, and the environment and public spaces. Since its inception, the Community Foundation has grown to be among the top 35 community foundations in the country and has distributed more than $1.4 billion through roughly 91,000 grants to nonprofit organizations. The Community Foundation’s mission is to make southeast Michigan a desirable place to live, work and play for all residents, today and tomorrow. For more information, please visit www.cfsem.org.

Responsibilities:

Grants Operations Leadership

• Lead the Foundation’s grants management function and serve as the primary owner of grantmaking operations across assigned portfolios.
• Establish and maintain operational standards for grant processing, documentation, reporting, and grant lifecycle management.
• Ensure grantmaking processes are efficient, scalable, well-documented, and consistently applied across programs.
• Partner with Community Impact and Donor Services leadership to ensure grantmaking operations effectively support programmatic and donor-directed grantmaking.
• Identify operational risks, bottlenecks, and opportunities for improvement and implement solutions that strengthen grantmaking effectiveness.

Team Leadership & Development

• Supervise, coach, and develop a team of Grants Managers and Grants Coordinators.
• Establish clear expectations, goals, and performance standards for all grants management staff.
• Create career development pathways and training plans that build grants management expertise across the team.
• Foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, customer service, and continuous improvement.
• Ensure appropriate staffing, workload balancing, and cross-training to support organizational needs and grant cycle volume.

Process Improvement & Operational Excellence

• Own grants management workflows, standard operating procedures, and process documentation.
• Ensure due diligence and compliance practices are aligned with the type, risk level, and purpose of each grantmaking model while minimizing unnecessary burden on applicants, grantees, and staff.
• Lead ongoing process improvement initiatives that increase efficiency, consistency, and user experience for staff and grantee partners.
• Develop and maintain operational metrics that support quality assurance and performance management.
• Partner with internal stakeholders to identify opportunities to reduce administrative burden while maintaining strong controls and compliance.
• Stay informed on emerging trends and best practices in grants management, philanthropy, and grantmaking operations and apply relevant learnings to Foundation practices.
• Lead operational change initiatives and support staff adoption of new processes, systems, and standards.

Systems Governance & Cross-Functional Partnership

• Serve as the grants management lead for grants management systems and operational technology.
• Partner with Technology Services to prioritize, test, and implement system enhancements that support grants management workflows and organizational goals.
• Ensure grants management systems support accurate data collection, reporting, compliance, and customer service.
• Ensure consistent grants management practices across Community Impact, Donor Services, scholarship administration, and other grantmaking functions as assigned.
• Support organizational reporting needs through strong data governance and operational oversight.

Quality Assurance & Service Delivery

• Ensure high standards of accuracy, timeliness, and customer service across all grants management activities.
• Oversee quality control processes related to grant records, payments, reporting, and organizational data.
• Ensure grantmaking activities comply with Foundation policies, donor intent requirements, IRS regulations, and applicable legal standards.
• Monitor team performance and operational outcomes to ensure consistent service delivery.
• Serve as a resource for resolving complex operational issues involving applicants, grantees, donors, or internal stakeholders.
• Promote a grantee-centered and customer-focused approach to grants administration.
• Serve as the primary escalation point for compliance questions, process exceptions, and complex grantmaking situations.

Qualifications

Required

• Seven or more years of experience in grants management, grantmaking operations, nonprofit administration, foundation operations, or a related field.
• Demonstrated experience leading complex operational functions and managing staff.
• Strong knowledge of grantmaking processes, compliance requirements, and operational best practices.
• Experience developing and implementing workflows, policies, procedures, and quality standards.
• Exceptional project management, organizational, and problem-solving skills.
• Strong communication and relationship-building skills with the ability to work effectively across departments and levels of an organization.
• Experience working with grants management systems, CRM platforms, or comparable operational systems.

Preferred

• Experience working in a community foundation, private foundation, corporate foundation, or philanthropic organization.
• Experience building, modernizing, or restructuring grants management operations, systems, or teams
• Experience managing grants management teams and supporting large-scale grantmaking portfolios.
• Familiarity with Salesforce grants management.
• Experience leading organizational change, process improvement, or operational transformation initiatives.
• Knowledge of scholarship administration, agency funds, designated funds, or donor-directed grantmaking.

Core Competencies

• Customer Focus: Prioritizes understanding and addressing the needs and expectations of our community and stakeholders. Demonstrates active listening, empathy, and responsiveness, with a consistent commitment to delivering exceptional service.
• Plans and Aligns: Invests time in planning, discovery, and reflection. Engages in active mindfulness to identify and adjust mental shortcuts and assumptions. Seeks out diverse perspectives and experiences to test thinking, proactively anticipates reactions and multiple outcomes, and plans for potential issues and industry trends.
• Collaborative: Works effectively with others—within the team and cross-functionally — to achieve individual, departmental, and organizational goals. Values diverse input, shared accountability, and partnership as essential to producing strong outcomes.
• Decision Making & Problem Solving: Simplifies complex challenges using critical thinking and sound judgment. Gathers and evaluates relevant information, incorporates multiple perspectives, identifies root causes, and determines practical, effective solutions. Applies an audience-centric approach by considering the needs of stakeholders when making decisions and implementing solutions.

Leadership Competencies:   

• Interpersonal Savvy: Relates well to all kinds of people up, down, across, inside and outside the organization; builds appropriate rapport with peers and leaders; builds constructive and effective relationships; uses diplomacy and tact; can diffuse even high-tension situations comfortably.     
• Leadership Professionalism: Exercises good judgement of what should be said to whom, where, and how.  Maintains confidentiality. Stamps out rumor mills. Contributes to constructive solutions. Encourages peers and staff to deal with challenges and opportunities head-on. Models the behavior we expect. Expresses views in the right rooms with the right people, avoids undermining decisions of others with words, actions, or body language.   
• Managerial Courage: Provides current, direct, complete and actionable feedback to others; Adroitly diagnoses people, process, practice, policy issues, and exercises good judgement in owning and addressing each in the right place and time.    
• Building Effective Teams: Blends people into teams where needed, irrespective of reporting lines; creates strong morale and spirit within and across teams; shares wins and successes; creates a feeling of belonging; Presses in to understand the 'why' of decisions, then helps craft and own go-forward plans.  

Benefits & Salary:

The Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan offers a robust total compensation package The targeted salary for those entering this role is $110,000 - $137,000. In addition to a competitive base salary, benefits include but aren’t limited to 20 days of vacation accrued monthly, 5 personal days, 11 holidays, 9 sick days accrued monthly, paid parental leave, and employer paid short/long - term disability.

The Community Foundation also offers a pension retirement program after 1 year of service which contributes 10% of salary.

Application Instructions:

This position is being recruited on an expedited timeline. Internal applicants will be reviewed before external applicants and the deadline for all applicants is Wednesday, July 8, 2026. Applications received before that deadline will take priority in our review process.

To apply, visit www.cfsem.org/careers and look for "Current Opportunities". Please submit your application, including your cover letter through the online portal.

To provide equal employment opportunities to all individuals, employment decisions will be based on merit, qualifications and abilities without regard to race, religion, creed, color, national origin, age, gender, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, height, weight, political or union affiliation, disability or any factor prohibited by law.