Grant Writing Confidential

HRSA just issued two Funding Opportunity Announcements (“FOAs”) for the Affordable Care Act Capital Development: Building Capacity Grant Program and the Affordable Care Act Capital Development: Immediate Facility Improvements Program”. The first program has $600,000,000 available and the second has $100,000,000. These are significant grant opportunities for existing Section 330 grantees, which include Community Health [...]

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A recent email from a prospective client got me to thinking about the best time to prospect and apply for grants. Our would-be client presented the idea of hiring us to his board. One board member pointed out that the organization lacked a current strategic plan, the last one having expired at the end of [...]

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When you find an ambiguity or outright contradiction in an RFP, it’s time to contact the Program Officer, whose phone number and e-mail address is almost always stashed somewhere in the RFP. The big problem with contacting a Program Officer is simple: you can’t trust what she or he tells you. The formal RFP—particularly if [...]

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Have you ever wondered where grant programs come from, like a child asking about the nature of baby making? Programs often don’t start with legislators; they percolate up from the minds of journalists, academics, and bloggers who realize, “X would be a great idea!” You can see this process in Mark Bittman’s editorial “Bad Food? [...]

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A continuing avalanche of bad economic news confirms the upheaval in the nonprofit world that I’ve been blogging about for the last few months. To paraphrase David Bowie in “Changes:” Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes (Turn and face the strain) Ch-ch-Changes Don’t want to be a richer [organization] Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes (Turn and face the strain) Ch-ch-Changes Just gonna have to [...]

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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 [...]

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In the 280 or so years I’ve spent grant writing (grant writing years should be considered as dog years because of endless deadlines and dumb RFPs), I don’t believe I’ve ever come across a nonprofit that voluntarily gave back significant federal grants. Faithful readers will know that I use the term “unicorn” for anything I [...]

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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: [...]

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Social and human service proposals are usually geared toward outcomes: you’re going to get a grant to provide after school services to at-risk youth, which will reduce the number of them who drop out of high school or get unfortunate tattoos they’ll later regret by 25%. To apply, you’re going to write a proposal based [...]

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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 [...]

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