Kristin Cooper is a funding strategist and government affairs expert with over 30 years of experience helping organizations compete for and win federal, state, and foundation funding. She founded Grant Management Associates in 2009 with a clear mission: bring strategic intelligence to the grant funding process — not just good writing, but the analytical rigor to know which opportunities are worth pursuing and the methodology to win them.

Under Kristin's leadership, GMA has secured over $2 billion in funding for clients with a 90.2% win rate — one of the highest in the industry. She developed GMA's proprietary Key Considerations Analysis (KCA) methodology, which evaluates competitive positioning, organizational fit, and scoring criteria before a single word of a proposal is written. This "Go/No-Go" approach is why GMA's clients don't waste resources on lost causes — and why they win at an extraordinary rate when they do pursue.

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Before founding GMA, Kristin served as a Full Professor at California State University, Chico's College of Engineering, where she directed grant-funded programs across five colleges. She was the founding director of CSU Chico's Environmental Resource Program and the Concrete Management Program. Kristin also served as a registered federal lobbyist, where she was instrumental in securing a $100 million line item in the Department of Energy budget.

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Today, Kristin leads GMA's evolution into a funding intelligence platform — integrating AI-powered grant matching with decades of human strategic judgment. She oversees a team that spans defense, energy, infrastructure, agriculture, and workforce development — the sectors where federal dollars are flowing and where GMA's clients are winning.