Founded in 1883, Chaffey College is one of the oldest community colleges in California. A federally-designated Hispanic-Serving Institution, Chaffey serves approximately 29,000 students annually across three Inland Empire campuses in Rancho Cucamonga, Chino, and Fontana, with a mission centered on improving lives through education, equity, and innovation.
Ray Cuellar, Director of Grants Development and Management at Chaffey College, had no grants management system to start from. What began as a search for a departmental tool quickly evolved into an enterprise-wide initiative, requiring process mapping, tiered security, customized approval workflows, and a carefully phased rollout. Today, Chaffey manages over 130 active grants at any given time, with $165 million in total managed award value.
Challenges
- No centralized system. Grant tracking relied on spreadsheets that lacked automated deadline alerts, centralized storage, or budget dashboards.
- Compliance and accountability risks. Without a purpose-built system, the College lacked infrastructure to manage grants at an enterprise level, creating exposure around compliance and data accuracy.
- Complex approval and security requirements. Managing grants required multi-level data access across executives, Deans, faculty, and project managers — something spreadsheets couldn’t support.
“Your system is only as good as the data and the cleanliness of the data that’s going into your system. Euna Grants provides us with the insight and organization we need to run grants at an enterprise level.” — Ray Cuellar
Solution
- Enterprise-wide deployment built from scratch. Chaffey implemented Euna Grants as a district-wide system, mapping their organizational hierarchy into multi-level approval structures, security tiers, and custom workflows.
- Grant Seeker and Grant Maker modules in one platform. Chaffey implemented both modules — one for managing external awards, one for administering internal CEAC competitive funding.
- Best of both worlds. During evaluation, Ray’s team found competitors skewed toward either fiscal or project management. Euna Grants combined both in a single platform.
“One of the bigger selling points for Euna Grants came down to the fact that most of our existing financial systems run on the fiscal year. We wanted a solution that would allow us to filter by grant year or grant cycle.” — Ray Cuellar
Results
- $165 million in managed award value across 215 active grant records, with more than 200 profiles entered into Euna in the past year alone, spanning both legacy and current awards.
- $3.6M awarded to 43 CTE programs through five annual CEAC funding cycles administered via the Grant Maker module.
- Proactive compliance and no missed reporting deadlines. Euna’s milestone notifications keep stakeholders ahead of due dates and log all engagement for audit protection.
“Analytics in Euna Grants by far is my favorite feature because you can quickly get in and see the health of the particular project.” — Ray Cuellar
Conclusion
For Ray Cuellar and the team at Chaffey College, Euna Grants was an institutional transformation. By investing in process mapping, coalition building, and a phased rollout, Chaffey built an enterprise grants operation from nothing. As Ray puts it: “We want to be good stewards of these funds, and Euna Solutions is a tool that helps us accomplish that.”