Nashville CARES is pleased to announce the appointment of Katy Blasingame as the new Director of Grant and Foundation Revenue. Blasingame is a professional grant writer with over 10 years of development, management, and grant writing experience in writing competitive, multi-year, and multi-million dollar grants.
Early in her career at Mental Health America, in Alexandria, Virginia, Blasingame assisted with writing grant proposals for the agency’s corporate funders. Several years later at the Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, she authored the State of Tennessee’s FFY12-13 Mental Health Block Grant, securing $8.4 million in federal behavioral health recovery funds for Tennesseans. In addition to grant writing, she gained valuable grant management experience as the Co-Principal Investigator of the federal Data Infrastructure Grant, administered by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
From 2012-2015, Blasingame served first as a Grant Writer and eventually Grant Writer Coordinator for Centerstone, one of the Nation’s largest not-for-profit community behavioral health providers. The very first grant she led and won was a minority HIV and substance abuse treatment competitive, multi-year grant worth $2.5 million from SAMHSA. The very last grant she led and won for Centerstone was also a competitive, multi-year grant for teen pregnancy prevention from the Office of Adolescent Health. Centerstone received the $10 million grant to deliver evidence-based prevention programs across 85 counties in three states. During her three years at Centerstone, she won over $30 million in local, state, and federal grants/contracts as project lead and contributed to the agency’s receipt of millions more in behavioral health funding as a support team member on numerous other grant applications.
“I am very humbled and excited that Tennessee’s premier HIV/AIDS service organization has chosen me to secure grant revenue to fund its valuable and life-saving services,” Blasingame said. “Ending the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Middle Tennessee, erasing stigma against LGBTQ communities, and eliminating healthcare disparities are all causes I believe are worth fighting for and serving.”
Recently, Blasingame had begun her own grant consulting side business to assist organizations in writing winning grant proposals. As of June 2018, she has won over $40 million in grant/contract funding. While her professional grant writing career has been primarily for behavioral health organizations, she has written grants for a variety of social service needs (e.g., HIV, integrated health care, foster care, peer support, homelessness, housing services, Veterans, school violence, crime victims, offender re-entry) and submitted grant/contract proposals to many federal and state agencies and local governments.
About Nashville CARES:
Nashville CARES is the premier HIV/AIDS organization in the region. We provide comprehensive education, a broad range of targeted services and effective advocacy, all in a highly personal, confidential and compassionate manner. We are proactively and aggressively working to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Middle Tennessee. With your help, Nashville CARES offers services annually to 55,000 Middle Tennesseans infected and affected by HIV/AIDS including: HIV prevention education to more than 35,000 youth and adults, almost 16,000 FREE confidential HIV tests, and essential support services to 3,000 men, women and children living with the disease. To learn more, visit us at NashvilleCARES.org and “Like” us on Facebook at Facebook.com/NashCARES.