First tip when it comes to color grading, ignore everything h44 has to say.
It sounds like you're between a rock and a hard place. Good graders are virtually impossible to get to work for free, even more so if they are experienced and have the correct equipment.
While black and white removes most of the need to grade, it makes the color correction step (most particularly the contrast) that much more important.
What kind of camera are you shooting on? The most common cameras these days are the canon consumer cameras. You can often get away without grading and still have a half decent, though far from perfect, output. How important is the final output?
I'd suggest to learn to shoot with a color chart and learn to use Davinci Resolve. While it doesn't work too well with shots with lots of movement (particularly those with light/color differences) what you do is (assuming you do it right) is shoot a color chart at the start (and sometimes at the end) of each shot. Then bring it into your resolve software and tell the software to match to that color chart. That (most often) does most of the work you need of your color correction step. Then apply a look you want and that's a very unsophisticated (and often decent looking) grade that you should be able to do yourself. Hell, there's an autocorrect button in Resolve. While it doesn't always work, it often does a reasonable job at getting you to a starting point, though you'll need to know the rest of your grading work from there.
With this technique, while it's far from great to use, it's really important to do everything as right as possible while in production and don't send anything into post to be fixed, as you're not going to know what to do.
