In episode #229 of The Grant – the EU funding podcast, I’m joined by Stephanie Harfensteller and David Christensen for a practical conversation about what it actually takes to build a funding team from scratch. Stephanie has been building up the EU funding division at FIR since 2019, while David has been developing a project and funding function inside BOFA, a public waste management organisation on Bornholm. Coming from different institutional realities — one in a research environment, one in a municipality-linked public organisation — they share a surprisingly similar experience: if you want serious funding capacity, you cannot treat it as an administrative add-on. You need structure around proposal development, project execution and long-term positioning, and you need people who can move across all three.

What makes the episode especially strong is that it stays with the reality of the work. We talk about recruitment, generalist versus specialist skills, junior-senior learning, knowledge management, management commitment and the fragility of teams built in project-based environments. Stephanie reflects on the difficulty of retaining and training researchers when careers move fast, while David shares the public-sector challenge of proving the value of innovation work inside an organisation more widely seen as operational and service-focused. Together, they offer honest reflections on patience, letting go of control, building trust-based teams and keeping a long-term funding strategy alive even when success rates drop and internal constraints tighten.

Time codes:

01:48 Guest introduction and fly in

07:01 What Is a Good Funding Support Unit?

18:08 The Skills Question

28:28 Building the Team in Reality

40:05 Keeping Knowledge in the Organisation

50:45 Working Under Organisational Constraints

01:06:07 Reflections and advice

01:10:24 The toughest challenge