Rolando Inzunza Embraces the ‘Art and Science’ of Grant Writing to Help Fund Indigenous Communities

By Jeremy Appel

(ANNews) – Growing up in Nova Scotia, Rolando Inzunza says he wasn’t familiar with “plights, successes and all of the reality of Indigenous people and their communities.” 

That changed in 2006, when Inzunza moved to Fort McMurray to work for the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo. 

“It was a whole new role for me and a whole new opportunity to learn,” he said in an interview with Alberta Native News. 

By the end of 2012, Inzunza was working for Suncor Energy as the company’s senior coordinator of Indigenous business development. 

Now Inzunza, who arrived in Canada as a political refugee from Chile when he was an infant, owns Edmonton-based Axioma Business Consulting, which originally focused on marketing and PR, but a year ago he decided to shift his focus towards grant writing. 

This transition happened as a result of work Inzunza had “been doing on the side of my desk” for Chard Métis Nation. 

“I was having some continued and building success with Chard,” he said. “I thought there’s something here that I think I can help other communities with.”

In 2024 alone, Inzunza said, he helped four Indigenous communities raise $3.5 million. 

“It was a bit of a jump, a bit of a risk, and just to see it catch like wildfire was pretty cool,” he said. 

Inzunza’s method consists of creating a database of grant opportunities, mainly government but also some corporate, and then meeting with clients to determine their needs and priorities before applying. 

“A lot of the priority areas are very similar—housing, substance use, mental health, food security—but where they are and what they’ve been able to accomplish so far with them is all very unique,” he explained. 

Inzunza says his goal is to help communities with “the art and the science behind writing the grant.” 

“To me, each grant is a huge win, whether that’s $5,000 or $500,000,” he said. 

Justin Herman, CEO of Chard Métis Nation, recalled in an interview the first grant Inzunza helped his people with—the provincial Indigenous Housing Capacity Grant, which provided funding to support the development of 10 homes in their community.

Herman said he did his best to apply for the grant himself, but the government grant director told him the application was incomplete, so he reached out to Inzunza, whom he’s known for years through “his background in helping Indigenous businesses.” 

“Knowing him on a personal level, I just had so much confidence in him that not only was his heart in the right place, but I knew that he had the skill set to help us successfully write these grants,” said Herman. 

“Grant writing, what I’ve come to learn, is more of an art than it’s just filling out a form with the information that’s asked of you.” 

Since then, Inzunza has helped Chard Métis get additional grants for primary health care, culture camps and community events “just to name a few,” said Herman. 

He added that grant funding is “especially important for the Métis communities,” because they don’t typically receive capacity funding from Indigenous Services Canada in the way that First Nations do. 

“Our community, for instance, is 100 per cent self-funded, so [for] any programming or anything we want to develop, we have to find that money somewhere,” Herman said. 

“Without the grants, these programs would have never come into existence.”