[Norton J. Kiritz] was founder and president of the Grantsmanship Center. Since 1972, the L.A.-based center has trained 100,000 people from nonprofit organizations and public agencies around the country in the art of writing grant proposals.

His curriculum was easy to teach and to learn, which "unleashed hundreds of people onto thousands of foundations," said Joan Flanagan, an author and expert on grass-roots fundraising. "That broke up the elite club. Before Norton came along, getting grants was all about relationships -- who knew who from the club or Yale or wherever.... Now anybody could learn how to do it."One beneficiary of Kiritz's training was Sister June Wilkerson, a Dominican nun who wanted to open a tattoo-removal clinic for gang members in the San Fernando Valley.

Kiritz began to grasp the problem when he was planning director for the anti-poverty Los Angeles Community Action Agency during the 1960s, when [Johnson]'s "Great Society" reforms channeled government resources into improving opportunities for racial minorities and the poor. Kiritz's job involved writing grant proposals and working with small community nonprofit groups enlisted in the war on poverty. Many of the groups struggled to keep their programs afloat, and he soon understood what underlay their difficulties.