In this episode I have Chiara Liguori in the virtual podcast studio for a talk about what Erasmus+ proposal writing and project management really looks like from inside a tiny youth NGO in Brussels. Chiara shares her journey from intern to the person drafting and managing Erasmus+ grants in an office of just two staff and a rotating board of volunteers. We talk about the “capacity myth” built into some parts of the programme – long and technical forms, assumptions about trained staff and internal systems – versus the reality of small organisations where one or two people juggle proposal writing, budgeting, implementation and reporting on top of everything else the organisation has to do.

From there we follow the full life cycle: learning proposal writing the hard way (googling terms, taking courses, recycling old applications), dealing with framework partnership agreements, and what happens after you win – when the joy of getting funded quickly becomes a daily balancing act between project delivery and administrative compliance. Chiara shares very concrete habits that helped: treating compliance as a routine rather than a last-minute panic, using simple tools like a big office calendar and a live Excel tracker for activities and metrics, and documenting as you go to protect institutional memory when staff or volunteers change. We end on the human impact: long hours, stacked deadlines, Brussels working culture, burnout risk – but also the meaning, skills and empowerment that come from “wearing multiple hats” in a small, mission-driven organisation.

Time codes:

01:41 Introduction

03:59 Fly in

05:14 The capacity challenge

13:59 The proposals

28:17 The projects

43:16 The human impact

55:08 Advice

56:59 The toughest challenge