Grant Writing Confidential

HUD just issued the FY ’12 Indian Community Development Block Grant (ICDBG) NOFA (Notice of Funding Availability, which is HUD-speak for RFP). There’s about $61 million available for federally recognized Tribes, Alaskan Native Villages and selected Native American organizations. This is a great opportunity for eligible Native American applicants to fund housing, economic development and [...]

[Read more →]

Faithful readers will remember our post “Seliger’s Quick Guide to Developing Federal Grant Budgets.” This is a companion post for developing foundation budgets. Unlike federal budgets, foundations rarely provide budget forms, or, if they do, the form is usually fairly simple and most grant writers, even novices, should be able to figure out how to [...]

[Read more →]

Many novice grant writers, and more than a few old hands, are terrified of federal grant budgets. Oddly, I find budget development one of the easiest aspects of grant writing, so I thought I would provide Seliger’s Quick Guide to Developing Federal Grant Budgets: * When you first read the RFP, ignore the budget instructions, [...]

[Read more →]

I hope faithful readers who are also federal grantees have been nice to their Program Officers, because this could be the year that Christmas comes early and often. I recently wrote about the unfolding FY 2011 federal budget fiasco. While cruising in the droptop to Palm Spring this weekend to visit relatives, I got to [...]

[Read more →]

If you’ve ever been to Jamaica, which I visited many years ago, no matter what is going wrong at the moment, the response from most Jamaicans is likely to be No problem mon! In case you missed this tidbit in the crush of off-year election news, Congress decided not to even try to pass a [...]

[Read more →]

In “So, How Much Grant Money Should I Ask For?,” we discussed a sometimes delicate issue for nonprofits: picking a grant request amount. Our standard answer: ask for the maximum because zeroes are cheap. Funders will sometimes cut down your budget but almost never increase it. Some obnoxious programs, however, won’t tell you how much [...]

[Read more →]

We sometimes write proposals, usually for foundation grants, when the applicant is not tax exempt under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC). Most government grant programs and almost all foundations require that the applicant be a public benefit, tax exempt organization, but one can also use a fiscal agent/fiscal sponsor. A fiscal agent [...]

[Read more →]

In “Brush the Dirt Off Your Shoulders: What to Do While Waiting for the Stimulus Bill to Pass,” Isaac included a footnote that says “This is a big grant no-no called ‘supplantation.’ In a future post I will explain how you can explain away supplantation in your grant writing anyway.” This is that post, except [...]

[Read more →]

President Obama highlighted his proposed partial “freeze” on discretionary federal spending during his State of the Union address last week, which set off a flurry of predictable wrangling among Democratic and Republican members of Congress (for a pretty good summary of what’s going on, see Democrats, Republicans Spar Over Cutting Deficit). While talk of budget [...]

[Read more →]

A New Yorker cartoon I like: If you write proposals, don’t be this cat. Any time you’re writing to an RFP—which, for grant writers, is virtually all the time—you’re required to respond to the RFP. If the RFP says, “give services to 300 participants per year,” you should say in your proposal that you’re going [...]

[Read more →]