Grant Writing Confidential

* Isaac predicted that YouthBuild will run a new competition rather than use earlier grants; it looks like other parts of the federal government have done the same in response to the Stimulus Bill, with the Teacher Quality Partnership Grants Program Recovery Act (ARRA) coming for another round of action.
* Speaking of schools, Steven Brill’s [...]

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* More news on Grants.gov and the Government Accountability Office: Grants.gov Has Systemic Weaknesses That Require Attention. Glad someone in Washington is finally paying attention; Stanley J. Czerwinski is the contact person, so I sent him an e-mail pointing out our earlier posts on the subject, but he hasn’t responded.
Part of the report’s introductory sentence [...]

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You know you’re a grant writer if… You’re reading the Health Resources and Services Administration’s (HRSA) Service Area Competition (SAC) and discover that the deadline is July 6.
You’re frustrated because Monday, July 6 is a holiday for most people: the Fourth of July is Saturday, so the “holiday” part is the Monday after, which means [...]

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Subscribers to the Seliger Funding Report saw that the Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) is this week’s featured grant. The program is significant and worth examining for a few reasons, including the massive amount of money available (nearly $2 billion) and how it illustrates some of the problems with disseminating and spending stimulus money in a [...]

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Those of you who are working feverishly to finish Federal proposals by Monday should stop surfing the Internet and get back to your assignment, because Grants.gov has finally figured out (or admitted) what Seliger + Associates did five years ago. According to the post “High Submission Volume” from the Grants.gov blog, which is written with [...]

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* We wrote about how to get your piece of the stimulus pie, noting that better-prepared organizations are more likely to be funded. Now the Washington Post reports that “Much in Obama stimulus bill won’t hit economy soon:”
It will take years before an infrastructure spending program proposed by President-elect Barack Obama will boost the economy, [...]

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Isaac wrote about the dangers of online submissions in “Grants.gov Lurches Into the 21st Century,” which says that real world deadlines should be at least two days before the actual deadline to ensure that your proposal is actually received. This will help you avoid latency and response problems when every other applicant rushes to upload [...]

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Last week I complained that FEMA still hadn’t posted the Assistance to Firefighters Grant (AFG) Program 2008 Fire Prevention and Safety Grants to Grants.gov, which particularly rankled after last year’s fiasco.
My post went up on February 1, and lo! on February 2, the FY2008 Fire Prevention and Safety Grants program appeared on Grants.gov. And it [...]

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Last year I railed about the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s inability to post the Assistance to Firefighters Grants program RFP on Grants.gov in a timely fashion in “FEMA Tardiness, Grants.gov, and Dealing with Recalcitrant Bureaucrats.” In addition, I sent a nastygram to FEMA about this failure, which someone named “R. David Paulison” responded to seven [...]

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—the same guys who brought us the stellar job after Hurricane Katrina—issued the Assistance to Firefighters Grants program on what Grants.gov says is March 26, 2008. But the deadline was April 04, 2008, which is absurdly short by any standards, let alone those of a federal agency. I sent an [...]

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