I didn't come to Catharsis as a software person looking for a market. I came to it as someone who has spent years inside small nonprofits, watching the same problem play out from every possible angle: as staff, as a board member, and as a volunteer.
I worked as a partnerships director at a small nonprofit in Washington, D.C., where writing and supporting grant proposals was a constant part of the job. I saw firsthand how much of a small team's time, time that should have gone to programs, to the community, to the actual mission, got swallowed by the paperwork of staying funded.
I've also seen that same pressure from the other side of the table. I served on the board of a different Washington, D.C. nonprofit, one serving the LGBTQ+ community, as chief development officer. The real question there was never whether the work was worth funding. It obviously was. The question was whether we had the hours to make the case to enough funders before the runway ran out. Good work goes unfunded not for lack of merit, but for lack of time to write about it well.
Hours spent writing about the mission are hours not spent doing it.
And I've felt it as a volunteer, too, supporting an LGBT center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a third organization entirely, far from the concentration of foundations and federal agencies clustered around D.C. Smaller organizations, further from where that funding is concentrated, don't get a smaller version of this problem. They get the same grant application that can take eighty hours to complete, with even less staff capacity to write it.
Employee, board member, volunteer: three completely different vantage points, at three different nonprofits, and the same trade every time. Hours spent writing about the mission are hours not spent doing it. That trade felt permanent for a long time. It isn't.
Catharsis exists because grant writing shouldn't require choosing between your mission and your paperwork. It learns your organization the way an experienced grant writer would, drafts strictly from evidence you can actually verify: your own documented outcomes plus a curated base of what funded proposals share, and never invents a fact to sound more convincing. You still bring the voice, the relationships, and the judgment only a human has. Catharsis just gives you back the hours.
If you've ever been up at midnight on a proposal when you'd rather have been out doing the actual work, I built this for you.