WEST | BENJAMIN

Strategy that gets made, decided on, and actually used.

West Benjamin is a boutique advisory firm working with foundations, nonprofits, and mission-driven organizations. Senior-led, no handoffs, no junior teams behind the curtain. When you work with West Benjamin, you work with the principal from kickoff to delivery. We bring together deep sector experience and AI-augmented delivery to produce sharper strategy, faster.

Selected work

Representative engagements, anonymized by client request. Chosen to reflect the strategic planning, decision systems, and capital strategy work we are best built to lead.

Strategic planning

Strategic Plan Rebuild: Board-Aligned

Large U.S. community foundation

Replaced a strategy that had stalled at board level. Realigned leadership around a focused set of strategic choices and delivered a plan designed for adoption, not presentation.

Decision systems

AI-Supported Grant Decision System

Global philanthropy advisory firm

Designed a decision system for high-volume grant allocation. Introduced structured triage and AI-assisted scoring without removing human judgment from final decisions.

Innovation Portfolio: Education & Workforce

Global foundation

Built and launched a cross-sector innovation portfolio with clear pipeline and decision criteria.

AI Insight Mining: 2,300 Applications

U.S. national foundation

Converted a large grant round into a structured intelligence asset to sharpen future funding direction.

Impact Investment Fund Architecture

Impact investing platform

Linked capital deployment to outcome frameworks and disciplined impact-led decisions.

Financing Strategy: Youth Employment

Global youth employment consortium

Identified practical pathways to scale financing mechanisms for funders and ecosystem actors.

The principal

Jarred Myers

Founder & Principal, West Benjamin

Jarred works at the intersection of strategy, AI, and impact, helping foundations, nonprofits, and mission-driven organizations turn complexity into decisions they can act on.

Prior to founding West Benjamin, Jarred served as a Program Officer at the Dell Foundation, where he launched the Innovation Portfolio and managed investments across Education and Youth Employment.

Having sat on both sides of the table as a funder, investor, and consultant, he brings a perspective most advisors do not have: what it actually feels like to be accountable for the decisions a strategy produces.

Duke Fuqua MBADell FoundationBoldly Go PhilanthropyArc ImpactSocial Finance IsraelGlobal Development IncubatorMassChallenge

Where we work

Active across North America and globally, with firsthand experience in markets most advisors know only from reports.

North America

Strategic planning, philanthropy advisory, decision systems, foundations, statewide nonprofits, and impact investors.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Youth employment, education innovation, and impact investing across South Africa, East Africa, and West Africa.

Middle East & South Asia

Blended finance, workforce development, and social enterprise across Israel, India, and MENA.

Resources

Practical frameworks and field notes from active engagements. Written for foundations, nonprofits, and mission-driven organizations navigating complex decisions.

Strategic Briefing

The End of the Grant Application: Why It No Longer Reduces Uncertainty

West Benjamin — April 2026

The grant application worked because it was a costly signal — producing a polished, well-argued submission required real effort, coordination, and strategic clarity. That relationship has broken down. This briefing examines why, using Christensen's Jobs to Be Done framework, and outlines what is emerging in its place.

Read the briefing →

Let's talk about what you're navigating.

We take on a focused number of engagements at a time, which means the work gets the attention it deserves. If you're at a strategic inflection point and want a thought partner who's been there, we'd like to hear from you.

[email protected]

We respond within one business day.

Applicant has 5 real insights → uses AI to expand into 10 polished pages

Reviewer has 10 pages → uses AI to compress back into 5 bullet points

Net signal transferred: ≈ 0

Two well-designed systems. Neither broken. No longer compatible.

A foundation I work with received 340 applications last cycle.

Their program team estimated that roughly 60% were AI-assisted. Reasonable. AI makes good organizations sound clearer and gives under-resourced ones a fighting chance at a professional application. That's not a problem. That's the technology working.

The issue: their review process was also AI-assisted. Triage tool, synthesis layer, scoring rubric. Two well-designed systems. Neither broken. Just no longer compatible.

Each pass through AI normalizes the output — filters for legibility, strips the friction and texture that actually predict whether an organization can execute. The process was designed for a world where writing quality was a proxy for organizational quality. AI dissolved that proxy. Which means the process needs a different signal layer, not just a better one.

Three upgrades worth considering

Constrain before you expand.

Ask for 200 words before 2,000. What an applicant can say clearly without AI assistance is the actual idea. What requires ten pages to explain probably isn't ready yet.

Design for specificity over narrative.

Not "describe your impact" — try "describe a decision you made that didn't work and what changed because of it." AI is genuinely good at synthesizing patterns. It cannot fabricate lived operational experience without revealing itself.

Introduce a moment the applicant cannot fully prepare for.

A short unrehearsed response, an unexpected question with a 48-hour turnaround, a conversation that goes off-script. The format matters less than the principle: at some point, the prepared narrative has to make contact with something unpredictable. That's where the signal lives.

The goal isn't to catch anyone doing something wrong. AI-assisted applications are a reasonable response to an AI-assisted world. The goal is to upgrade the process to match it — so the organizations that actually have something real are the ones that surface.

Your process was designed for a world where writing quality predicted organizational quality. That world is gone.

Strategy that gets made, decided on, and actually used.

You always work with the principal

We arrive with hypotheses, not questions

AI-augmented, not AI-dependent

Fixed fees. Milestone accountability.