Grant Writing Confidential

The Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Family Assistance* just issued a Funding Opportunity Announcement (DHHS-speak for RFP) with tens of millions of dollars available and no matching requirement for the Pathways to Responsible Fatherhood Grants program. This new program was apparently hidden in plain sight in a [...]

[Read more →]

According to the New York Times, “the city’s too fertile and apparently pesky geese will soon face a grim fate, but will not go to waste: They will go to feed hungry Pennsylvanians.” I’m not making this up. The idea might sound familiar to Grant Writing Confidential readers. Isaac wrote a post called “Project NUTRIA: [...]

[Read more →]

For reasons not clear to me, I am on the (usually) happy-talk email distribution list of Dorothy Stoneman, doyenne of YouthBuild USA, the trade group for the 273 or so YouthBuild providers across America. I’ve never met Dorothy, who is generally affable in her emails and is a tireless advocate and change agent (note: the [...]

[Read more →]

A friend of mine just applied to medical residencies, and in the process he worked himself into a lather over what specialty he wanted to choose and how he should order his preferred programs. He made a nearly fatal mistake of the kind many grant applicants do: he waited until the last minute to make [...]

[Read more →]

Last Sunday, I wrote about the Obama Administration’s emerging planned Federal FY 2011 Budget Cuts. Not to be upstaged and right on cue, this week the House Appropriation Committee released a press release regarding Republican plan to cut the budget, CR Spending Cuts to Go Deep, which proposes $58 Billion in “non-security discretionary spending reductions” [...]

[Read more →]

Cuts to Federal discretionary spending are coming, whether at the larger percentages proposed by congressional Republicans, more modest levels offered by the Obama administration or more likely somewhere in between. An opinion piece in today’s New York Times highlights this new reality: “The Easy Cuts Are Behind Us” by Jacob Lew, director of the White [...]

[Read more →]

Every January for the past three years, I’ve written a post about why it’s a great time to apply for federal and state grants. Here I go again: this post explains why nimble organizations will start the New Year by kick-starting their grant writing efforts, albeit for a different reason than in past Januarys. Now [...]

[Read more →]

As 2010 proposals slide into the archives, I find myself reflecting on the inadequacy of Grants.gov and other federal electronic grant submission portals. After about seven years of electronic submissions, why is the federal government so incredibly incompetent at this? After all, Amazon.com can take hundreds of thousands of orders a day and Apple can [...]

[Read more →]

I received a phone call last week from a woman (let’s call her “Mrs. Smith”) who just started a tiny new nonprofit in South Central LA during this never-ending recession. She wants to help the growing number of homeless youth and unemployed young adults hanging out on the streets. Mrs. Smith’s call reminded me of [...]

[Read more →]

Ed Nelson asks, “Do conservative non-profits get grants or are federal grants such an anathema to them, [and] they choose not to apply?” I want to answer, but the question itself feels wrong because politics shouldn’t be an issue in human service delivery. Politics and political views matter in Congress, which decides what kinds of [...]

[Read more →]