About Jana

Jana Hexter hails from the land of Robin Hood and helps grant writers get more money in a more sustainable way by weaving together a feminine and spiritual approach with a practical, step by step approach gained from 25 years of hands on experience in the field.

She written well over 200 successful proposals and raised over $90 million for her grant writing clients — school districts, higher education institutions, and human service agencies throughout the U.S..

Her company Grants Champion has helped hundreds of people raise millions of dollars for programs that make a difference.

She is an extrovert who loves teaching in front of a big crowd, but is uncomfortable in large social gatherings. If you see her at a conference or cocktail party and she’ll be mulling around in the back feeling a little overwhelmed by the whole thing. She is also a lover of travel, pilgrimages, dancing, waterfalls in the woods, and dark chocolate.

Jana is the author of Grant Writing Revealed: 25 Experts Share Their Art, Science, and Secrets which is based on interviews with experts who have collectively raised $1.7 billion and written 24,000 proposals with 400 years of experience.

A captivating teacher, she co-taught one of the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s all-time most highly subscribed webinars. She also taught grant writing at New York University’s George H. Heyman Jr. Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising. She has spoken at the Grant Professionals Association (GPA) and Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) National Conferences. Her “Presentation on Presentation” at the National GPA conference was given the highest ranking by conference attendees.

She served on the National Board of the GPA and is a former chapter board member of the AFP Finger Lakes. Jana Jane also served as a Subject Matter Expert for the Grant Professionals Certification Institute (GPCI) to develop the Grant Professionals Certificate exam. In addition, she has served on peer review panels for New York

State and the United States Department of Education. Before starting her consulting business, she worked for seven years at Cornell University as a grants administrator and grant writer.

She was born and raised in Nottingham, England. After moving to the United States, she earned her BA cum Laude in Government/Slavic and East European Studies from Cornell University and conducted research in Eastern Europe as a Ford Foundation Clusters Scholar. She is lucky enough to live in Ithaca, NY next to a sacred waterfall.

If you were to look at her bookshelf (pared down to one shelf after downsizing) you would find some poetry (of the mystics, David Whyte, & Mary Oliver), Norse and Celtic mythology, Strunk & White, The Impossible Will Take a Little While, The Billionaire Who Wasn’t, The Gift, Braiding Sweetgrass, Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics, Lynne Twist’s The Soul of Money, Jalaja Bonheim’s The Hunger for Ecstasy, some beloved cookbooks and a Louise Erdrich novel or two. The only two subscriptions that she finds worth keeping are The Economist and The Sun - both because they are beautifully written.

If you were to check her Netflix account you’d see she’d been watching British mysteries, Grand Designs for inspiration and a reality check, The Ascent of Woman, The Durrells in Corfu and other BBC/ITV delights, and the Gilmore Girls with her daughter.

She is also a gifted intuitive and medium offering access to eternal wisdom through The Jana Channel.