The Round 1 Winner of She Seals the Deal Grant is...

I couldn't wait to share this one.

I read every single application. Every single one. And narrowing it down was harder than I expected, because so many of you wrote things that were incredibly meaningful. 

You are building a business that is impactful for your clients, while at the same time creating financial independence. So cheers to that!

Ok, now cue the drumroll....🥁🔊🎉 

Introducing, Round 1 Winner of She Seals the Deal Grant…
Grace Jenkins, Founder of Teaching with Grace.

Grace sells a Mega Teacher Drive — over 28,000 pages of K–5 classroom resources. Math, ELA, test prep, classroom management, daily slides, all of it. Her offer keeps improving even after her clients buy it at no extra cost.

She's a 25-year-old serving teachers in six countries. Six figures. Running the whole thing off one laptop.

LIKE EVERY BUSINESS, IT STARTED FROM ZERO. 
In 2023, Grace was teaching in a classroom with mold in it. It made her sick. So she left — no savings, no backup plan, a thousand miles from home, and education was the only thing she'd ever done.

In her words: "I was willing to bet on myself more than keep submitting job applications with my fingers crossed."

She was willing to take that leap of faith and bet on herself. So she took out a loan and planned to go back for her master's. And while she was pulling together a portfolio, she looked at the pile of resources she'd made for her own classroom over the years -- the ones her colleagues kept telling her to sell -- and realized she was sitting on something. So she posted about it on TikTok and voila! Teaching with Grace was born.

Today it’s grown into Teacher Butterflies, her community for teachers -- which launched about a month ago and already has around 1,500 members.

GRACE CREATES A RIPPLING SUCCESS EFFECT
Grace’s mission to help teachers doesn’t stop in the classroom. She is constantly thinking about ways to give back to them and developed a program called Earn with Grace so that they can earn alongside her. 

On a trial run, Grace invited a group of 10 founding ambassadors to share her resources and get paid a commission to do so. Part of the launch included hand-packing a gift box for each ambassador to get them excited about the program and kick it off right. Just by sharing the gift box on social media, her ambassadors were able to generate sales and earn a commission doing so. Grace has been wanting to expand this program.

When I shared the winning news with Grace, she said, "This grant doesn't just touch me. It's going to touch educators as well."

I love the ripple effect.

HERE'S WHAT SHE'S DOING WITH THE $5,000.
With $2,500, half of the grant money, Grace will be able to activate 50 new ambassadors. 50 teachers earning commissions by sharing something they actually believe in. If her new ambassadors see similar traction to her founding members, they will generate thousands of dollars flowing back into teachers' pockets, not just Grace's. And because ambassadors earn ongoing commissions, they're incentivized to keep sharing long after the initial launch.

Think about this -- if the 50 new ambassadors make just 5 sales each, they’ll be generating 250 sales. At $80 each, thats $20,000 in sales! And $5,000 of that will be going back into teacher’s pockets.

And those are just initial numbers! The compounding effect of this program expansion month over month has tremendous potential - both for Grace and her ambassadors.

The ripple keeps rippling.

The other $2,500 will go to purchase a more powerful computer so Grace can run Claude cowork on one machine while she creates on the other. "By having two computers, I can be double the person I am now." She's not just buying a computer. She's essentially hiring an employee that costs $2,500 one time and can work for her round the clock.

ONE MORE THING.
Grace's mom spent thirty-six years in the classroom and recently retired.

I bet she's so proud watching her daughter build a life of freedom outside the classroom, while reaching further inside it than she ever could standing at the front of one.

Because think about what Grace actually walked away from. One room. Twenty-five kids a year. That was the ceiling.

Her resources are now in classrooms in six countries. That's not twenty-five kids. That's tens of thousands of them, and the number grows every single week.

She didn't leave teaching. She just stopped doing it one classroom at a time.

NOW THE PART I REALLY NEED YOU TO HEAR.
After Grace submitted her application, she took a grant-writing class.

Then she messaged me and asked if she could redo the whole thing. She thought she'd botched it. In her own words, she knew nothing about what she was doing.

Yet she did not end up re-doing her grant AND won anyway. 

Because here's what she did without knowing she was doing it: she told me exactly where the dollars were going, what it would return, and who else it impacted along the way. She shared her story in a meaningful and memorable way. She shared her mission and that it went beyond her and her family. She was open and vulnerable and shared what was on her heart. And that sealed the deal.

I'm teaching more about what each of the finalists had in common next week.
You can join my FREE grant writing workshop here.

Learn it. Then use it. On Round 2 of She Seals the Deal and all of your future applications.

Congratulations, Grace. Go make it happen!
I can’t wait to witness your future success.

— Jen Blake Gluckow