About Spekola
There is no shortage of good projects in the world.
There is a shortage of proposals that make the case for them.
Spekola was founded to close that gap — bringing the technical rigor that donors require to the organizations doing work worth funding.
The Origin
I kept watching capable field teams lose funding for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of their work.
The proposal lacked a logical framework, its budget narrative didn’t match what the funder required, and its M&E plan listed activities but had no indicators, baseline, or data-collection method until after approval.
Not once did I see a project lose funding because the work itself was not worth doing.
My name is Raquel D’Garay-Juncal. I came to this work through medicine, having practiced in underserved and indigenous communities across Mexico and Central America, then spent over a decade in project design, grant writing, and evaluation. That background shaped the way I read a proposal: not as a document, but as a commitment that either holds up under scrutiny or it doesn’t. Increasingly, the same question applies to the systems and tools organizations adopt, long before anyone thinks to ask it.
I founded Spekola to close that gap: between work that’s good enough to fund and a proposal that fails to show it.
What Drives The Work
A proposal is not paperwork. It is how a commitment reaches a real person.
I know what it looks like when a project arrives fully resourced, and what it looks like when it does not. The gap is rarely the mission. It is almost always the mechanism.
The coordinator who has submitted three proposals into a process that never explains why any of them failed. The community and field team whose work never got as far as the paperwork did.
I read a proposal the way I read a patient chart: looking for what’s missing before it costs the project something.
Spekola works directly with you at every stage. On select projects, we bring in trusted professionals with complementary expertise, so your project has what it needs, without layers it does not.
Let’s see if I can strengthen your next proposal.
The first conversation is 30 minutes and free.
Tell me about your project and your funder.
I will tell you what I see — and whether I am the right person to help.