We're never paid on contingency. Prospecting, application review, and proposal development are billed as flat project fees or a monthly retainer — the price is the same whether or not the award comes through.
Matthew F. Johnston
Most consultants spend a career climbing toward the funding. Matt started at the top — and came down to the work.
Matt Johnston's journey in public funding began in a U.S. foreign-service family — living in five countries before he ever filed a grant report. Watching American dollars flow into community projects around the world, he learned early that some funding builds things that last, some is wasted, and some quietly creates dependency.
He began his federal career in the grants unit of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where he obligated $305 million across roughly 320 awards — learning, from the inside, exactly how a federal funder thinks, decides, and protects its taxpayer dollars. From there he crossed to the recipient side: an $86 million annual research portfolio at Virginia Commonwealth University's College of Engineering, an R1 institution, and a $35 million federal portfolio with the Oneida Indian Nation (“America’s First Ally”).
Most consultants only ever see funding from the applicant's side, looking up. Matt started in the funder's chair and worked his way down to the community — funder logic first, recipient reality layered on top. As a former federal grant reviewer, he also knows exactly how scoring panels read a proposal before a word of yours is written.
Now based in Richmond, Virginia, and serving clients nationwide, he founded MFJ Grant Strategies in 2025 — bringing that full-circle perspective to the municipal and state governments, tribal nations, and nonprofits doing real development work in their own communities. Federal is the specialty, not the limit: the firm crafts strategy across state and local funding too, with one aim — building institutional capacity that outlasts any single grant.
That conviction runs in the family. Matt is the great-great nephew of the historic philanthropist Martha Berry, who built Berry College to lift rural communities through self-sufficiency rather than charity.