Built from lived operational experience.

I am a CFO and operator by training. For years, I have managed complex funding, staffing, and compliance across many projects at the same time. What I saw consistently was not a lack of funding or talent, but a lack of systems that could handle the complexity of the work.

I solved this problem manually for years by building internal frameworks, spreadsheets, workflows, and guardrails. It worked, but it was expensive, fragile, and heavily dependent on senior staff time.

Awardees was built to make that operational intelligence scalable. It brings people, projects, funding, and deliverables into one system so organizations can plan clearly and operate with confidence.

Awardees was incubated alongside full-time executive leadership and an Executive MBA. Those experiences directly shaped the platform. 

As Awardees enters its next phase, I am preparing to focus more intentionally on growing the company with care and rigor.

This is not a side project. Awardees exists because this problem is real, costly, and repeated across organizations.

Dana Hawkins, Founder