Sedale Turbovsky
Founder and CEO, OpenGrants
Sedale co-founded OpenGrants to make public funding legible. He has spent a decade at the intersection of the citizen experience, public data and public agencies — state, local and federal — and writes the OpenGrants Encyclopedia.
Background
Sedale's work has centred on the machinery of public funding rather than its rhetoric: winning multi-million dollar grants, building enterprise SaaS platforms used by government, and raising venture capital for startups. That combination is unusual and it shapes what he writes — most funding content is written either by practitioners who have never built the systems or by technologists who have never won an award.
OpenGrants grew out of a specific frustration: the information needed to win public funding exists, is public, and is almost impossible to assemble. The company's answer is infrastructure — a live database of grants, contracts and funders, free to search and open to AI engines rather than gated.
What he writes about
The encyclopedia covers how public and philanthropic funding actually works — eligibility and registration, proposal craft, budgets and indirect rates, evidence and evaluation, the federal, state, foundation and SBIR tracks, and post-award management. It is reference content, sourced to regulation and agency notice rather than to other people's summaries.
Editorial standards, sourcing and the review cycle are set out in theeditorial policy. Errors and outdated figures go tocorrections.
Articles
75 encyclopedia articles.
- Allowable, Allocable, and Reasonable Costs
- Budgets and Grant Finance
- Building a Compliance Matrix
- Building a Grant Pipeline
- Building a Grants Function
- Closing Out a Grant
- Community Foundations and Donor-Advised Funds
- Corporate Giving and Corporate Grants
- Cost Share and Matching Requirements
- Demonstrating Organizational Capacity
- Direct vs Indirect Costs
- Eligibility and Organizational Readiness
- Evidence, Evaluation, and Data
- Federal Grants Explained
- Finding and Qualifying Funding
- Fiscal Sponsorship for Grant Seekers
- Foundation Grants
- Free Grant and Funder Data Sources
- Funding Tracks by Funder Type
- Goals, Objectives, and Activities
- Grant Cash Flow and Reimbursement
- Grant Eligibility Explained
- Grant Funding Fundamentals
- Grant Funding Glossary
- Grant Funding Myths, Corrected
- Grant Reporting Requirements
- Grant Termination, Suspension, and Appeals
- Grant Timing and the Funding Calendar
- Grants vs Contracts vs Cooperative Agreements
- Grants vs Loans, Equity, and Contracts
- Hiring a Grant Writer
- How Funders Decide Who Gets Money
- How to Build a Logic Model
- How to Read a NOFO
- How to Read a Notice of Award
- How to Search for Grants
- Indirect Cost Rates and the De Minimis Option
- Internal Controls for Grant Recipients
- Levels of Evidence in Grant Funding
- Managing the Award
- Non-Dilutive Capital for Startups
- Outputs, Outcomes, and Impact
- Performance Measurement and Indicators
- Prior Approval and Changing a Grant
- Public Data Sources for Needs Statements
- Research Grants at NIH and NSF
- Researching a Funder with Form 990
- SAM.gov Registration and the UEI
- SBIR and STTR Explained
- State and Local Government Grants
- Subrecipient Monitoring and Pass-Through Funding
- The Abstract and Project Summary
- The Anatomy of a Grant Budget
- The Anatomy of a Grant Proposal
- The Documents Every Grant Application Needs
- The Go/No-Go Decision
- The Grant Funding Lifecycle
- The Grant Readiness Assessment
- The Letter of Inquiry
- The OpenGrants Encyclopedia
- The Single Audit
- The True Cost of Running a Program
- Theory of Change vs Logic Model
- Time and Effort Documentation
- Types of Grants Explained
- What Is a Grant?
- What to Do When a Grant Is Declined
- Who Funds What: The Funder Landscape
- Writing a Budget Narrative
- Writing a Statement of Need
- Writing a Sustainability Plan
- Writing an Evaluation Plan
- Writing for the Reviewer
- Writing the Project Design
- Writing the Proposal