The Aubrey Group began its engagement with the Borough of Roselle in January 2024, when we were selected to support the Borough’s grant-seeking efforts for its fire and police departments. Throughout 2024, we assisted the Borough in researching and applying for public safety grants such as FEMA’s Assistance to Firefighters Grant program and the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General’s Federal Highway Safety Grant program. 

Meanwhile, the Borough has maintained an aggressive grant-seeking strategy for all departments, applying to and winning a variety of state, county, and federal grants. However, while the Borough was successful in winning external funding, the Borough’s unfamiliarity with the nuances of grant administration caused undue stress and frustration in managing each of the Borough’s many active awards. Our team noticed this challenge and informed Roselle about our specialization in award administration and program management. With this in mind, the Borough revised The Aubrey Group’s scope of work in 2025 to develop a system that would track each of the Borough’s active awards, and help manage the Borough’s grants team – a collection of civic department heads and Borough council members – to ensure that each grant was properly administered. 

Through a pragmatic, high-level approach, our team outlined an actionable strategy to align departments, clarify grant deadlines and deliverables, and gather the necessary data and information to solve pervasive and complex challenges compliantly. This included a detailed punch list of tasks for the Roselle Borough and The Aubrey Group team members to address. In addition, we established a collaborative process and routine communications cadence to ensure all parties were aligned on deliverables and expectations. This cadence included a weekly meeting to discuss all grant-related updates, which are transferred to a project management software to track all grant progress, and a weekly email of pressing tasks for administering each grant. 

Since starting our engagement with Roselle Borough, we have developed a large-scale system of tracking the Borough’s existing grants through our internal project management software. This system catalogs each grant based on the external funding source, the Borough department that is responsible for administering the grant, and the award period’s start and end dates. In addition, as we interviewed the Borough’s grants team members and reviewed grant documents, we added all relevant grant reporting steps and deadlines. This created a high-level calendar of the Borough’s active grants and specific steps required to ensure that each grant-funded project is carried out within the grant period.

Regular in-person and virtual consultations are ongoing with members of the grants team to address immediate questions, challenges, and new developments. While The Aubrey Group team currently handles the majority of the Borough’s grant administration, the Borough’s grants team is receiving education and training on the process to expand their capacity, skillsets, and confidence. 

About the Client: The Borough of Roselle, known as the “First in Light,” is located in Union County, New Jersey. Historically, the world’s first electric lighting system was employed by Thomas Edison in Roselle in 1883. Roselle earns state, federal, and local Union-County-based funding each year, and focuses its grant-seeking efforts on creatively solving public safety problems within the Borough, improving public infrastructure for the Borough’s residents, and increasing the Borough’s overall livability through economic development programs that benefit residents and small businesses alike.