$400M in Federal Grant Funding: Learn How to Position Your Department to Win Your Share (with Cornelia Sigworth) Ep|113

Cornelia Sigworth spent 26 years inside the U.S. Department of Justice, rising to Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to the Director, overseeing hundreds of millions of dollars in public safety funding across the country. Today, as Senior Director of Strategic Engagement at Axon, she continues shaping the field through leadership development, peer learning, and strategic violent crime reduction. In this episode of The Chief Exchange, Cornelia breaks down how departments can dramatically increase their win rates for federal grant funding, why most grants get denied, and how data and scoring criteria truly drive decisions behind the scenes. She explains how applications are evaluated, what peer reviewers are actually looking for, and why simply not reading the instructions disqualifies many agencies. We also discuss the real challenges first line supervisors face that chiefs may not realize, how miscommunication about “the why” erodes culture, and how to fix those breakdowns. From peer to peer learning exchanges to building measurable violent crime reduction strategies, Cornelia shares why many department initiatives fail and what it takes to execute with discipline, clarity, and accountability.