Intro
- Acumen is seeking a Grants Manager based in Toronto to lead end-to-end grant management for a five-year, USD 80M donor-funded program, ensuring full compliance, accurate financial tracking, and effective coordination across global teams. They will be accountable for producing timely, high-quality narrative and financial reports, proactively flagging any issues in processes, data, or deliverables. This role serves as a central connector across program, finance, and Development and Partnerships teams to support successful program implementation.
Program Operations & Administration
- Provide operational and project management support for programmatic activities, including documentation, deliverable tracking, meeting coordination, preparing agendas, recording minutes, and managing follow-ups.
- Track milestones, deadlines, and donor contract obligations, proactively flagging issues and supporting timely resolution.
- Manage grant check-ins with project stakeholders per agreement terms and coordinate logistics for meetings, travel, and events.
- Assist the Program Lead in meeting all grant requirements.
- Ensure organized recordkeeping and maintain documentation systems in compliance with donor standards and requirements.
Financial & Compliance Support
- Work closely with the Program Finance Manager to maintain and update internal budgeting tools and coordinate clear communication with regional teams on budget allocations.
- Collect, review, and organize expense documentation (invoices, receipts) to ensure compliance with donor and audit requirements.
- Assist in reviewing financial templates and reports prior to donor submission, ensuring accuracy and alignment with internal records.
- Coordinate with budget holders to ensure funds are correctly allocated and financial data remains up to date.
- Support documentation and sharing of lessons learned, tools, and best practices to strengthen internal learning and adaptive management.
- Promote effective use of internal systems and tools to support communication and document workflows.
Partnership & Stakeholder Management
- Build strong relationships with teams across regions involved in program implementation.
- Coordinate with Partnerships Lead on any due diligence assessments, with the support of Finance and Legal teams where needed, when and as required by Acumen and the donor.
- Support Partnerships Lead on organizational assessments of Partners as per Acumen’s procedures.
- In coordination with the Program Lead, Legal, and Finance draft local Partner Agreements/MoUs with relevant Annexes and take through signing processes.
- Contribute to partner capacity building as required and identified in partner assessment.
- Support and advise Acumen colleagues with queries related to donor compliance on this project.
- In collaboration with relevant teams, contribute to the development of any program assets and other relevant information pieces for donor visits/meetings.
- Draft and organize briefing notes and other materials for external meetings.
- Maintain up-to-date relationship management (SalesForce) records and contact history with partners and stakeholders.
- Coordinate follow-ups and documentation with partners post-meeting or events.
Donor Reporting and Monitoring
- Lead coordination, drafting, and finalization of donor reports, ensuring high quality and alignment between narrative and financial reporting.
- Monitor financial performance, highlighting potential under- or over-spend and following up with finance and budget holders.
- Track grant payment schedules and coordinate with the finance team to ensure timely requests and disbursements.
- Work with budget holders, program teams, and finance to compile accurate program data throughout the project lifecycle.
- Coordinate data collection timelines with country teams and workstream leads.
- Support the Impact Management Lead with formatting and documentation of results frameworks, log frames, and data inputs for reporting.
Skills & Qualifications
- Minimum 8 years of relevant work experience managing complex, grant funded, multi-year projects;
- Direct experience with major international, corporate donors, foundations and non profit organisations
- Exceptional organizational skills, including time and project management, and ability to meet deadlines
- Strong project and grant reporting experience with knowledge of systems leading project and grant reporting systems (e.g., Salesforce, Asana, etc.) and programme management qualifications equivalent to PRINCE/ PRINCE 2
- Excellent oral and written communication skills for diverse stakeholders across regions and at varying levels of accountabilities.
- Experience in managing and understanding results frameworks, Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) systems, logframes and learning agendas.
- Prior regional, in-country experience working in East and West Africa, preferred
- Willingness to travel according to grant requirements and work across time zones (US/UK/Africa).
- Authorized to work in Canada, based in Toronto
- Self reflective and aligned with Acumen’s values
- #LI-ACU1
