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Are you ready to age while working in academia?

This is a guest post by Genie Giaimo, Assistant Professor of Writing & Rhetoric, Middlebury College (Ggiaimo@Middlebury.edu). While the post focuses on aging and academia, it has implications for grant seekers and grant writers: most federal grants for the delivery of services to the elderly come are derived from the 1965 Older Americans Act administrated by the DHHS Administration for Community Living (“ACL”). The ACL funds over 600 Area Agencies on Agencies (AAA) across America, which is turn fund local nonprofit and public service providers. So, your agency can get OAA grants directly from the feds and/or your local AAA. The National Institute on Aging (“NIA”) is the primary federal source for research grants relating to aging.

Higher education deserves more attention as a workplace site, and, as part of this effort, I plan to survey and interview academic workers across rank, years of experience, and disability and health statuses. Consider higher ed in the context of America’s workforce, which is undergoing unprecedented seismic shifts—with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and concomitant lockdowns, workers started to rethink their relationship to their jobs (McKinsey & Company, 2022). Many workers now report their new top concerns as being able to work remotely, organize safer workplaces and better wages, and shifting priorities from “workism” to non-work pursuits. Corporations are flirting with the four-day work week* and alternative productivity models. Remote work is undergoing a natural test case and has largely been found to increase worker productivity (George et al., 2021) though managers and workers differ in their perceptions of remote work outcomes (Tsipursky, 2022). Labor is in our zeitgeist because work leads to self-efficacy and for most, give meaning to their lives. And with the increase in union organizing—across many different sectors including ones not historically pro-union, like the tech sector—workers have begun to recognize their value.

The last fifty years, however, have seen limited gains for American workers, including stagnant wages, increased cost of living, and an increase in overall working hours (Lee, 2022). Americans work more than their French, German, and Japanese counterparts (International Labor Organization). And the 2008 financial collapse saw the devastation of stable middle class jobs in favor of part-time, low wage work (McCallum, 2020). For these reasons, and more, over 40 million Americans changed their jobs the past several years. While many bemoaned “the great resignation,” it is more accurate to say that the workforce has undergone a “great reshuffle” (Meister, 2022). Time is now seen as an invaluable commodity (Stolzoff, 2023).

As a scholar, I’m attuned to the underlying sentiment around workers and labor in the media landscape. My research reveals that the attitudes about labor and productivity differ greatly between workers and management. The most fascinating connections, however, between rhetoric and work are the ones that center on the conflation of individual health and well-being with the well-being of the nation. In the early days of the pandemic, we often heard such rhetoric from politicians and from our government—for example, that keeping the economy open was more important than individual lives. As Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, suggested elderly grandparents are willing to die for the benefit of the economy and the nation (Levin, 2020). The trade-off between individual and economic benefits also came to light in government policies around who was labeled an essential worker (and, later, who received work from home privileges and who did not). This rhetorical flip flopping became a catalyst for labor organizing which, in turn, shifted the identities of many care workers. And, as the essential worker as “hero” narrative was replaced with less favorable interpretations of care workers labor, healthcare workers and teachers, for example, left their jobs in droves (McCallum, 2022). The rhetorical figurations of workers, deeply impacts not only the workplace but worker identity; this is not just an economic or governmental issue.

Higher education has followed a similar trajectory over the last half century with the hollowing-out of tenure, “adjunctification” of the professorate, and the de-skilling of many university-based jobs moved to part-time student and staff lines. The supply of people who want to work in universities is far higher than the demand for workers, so wages (considered broadly) have stagnated or fallen. At the same time, the cost of a college education has ballooned, as has the number of administrators staffing colleges and universities. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated labor organizing as the recent strikes at Rutgers University of California—among many others—demonstrate (Iafolla, 2023). We are also in an unprecedented moment for academic workers organizing and unionizing (Barnes & Thornburg LLP, 2023). Yet the patchwork system of laws and regulations that public and private higher education institutions follow deeply impacts who can organize and form a union.

My research is centered on the impact of aging on the academic worker and workplace. If the local, state, and federal laws that dictate who can unionize and who is prohibited, the complex set of roles that academic workers occupy further complicates the landscape. For example, tenure track faculty at private institutions are not allowed to unionize because they were determined to be managers by the 1980 Yeshiva ruling (AAUP), yet non-tenure track faculty and staff are excluded from this SCOTUS ruling. At public universities and colleges, all workers can unionize. Still, the stakes of unionization are high. Intimation, misinformation, and downright retaliation are some of the barriers to organize. The stakes are highest for the most precarious university workers, like adjuncts and other part-time, non-benefitted, workers. Many institutions engage in union busting tactics including intimidation, misinformation and retaliation (AAUP; Fang, 2022).

The patchwork system of rules around union organizing as well as retaliation—combined with the Covid-19 pandemic and a better than average job market—have been catalysts for many university workers. Another, darker side to this tale is the ongoing exploitation of workers in higher education. Non-tenure track workers now many up over 70% of the professoriate with national numbers hovering in the mid-20% range for TT lines. At the same time, academic freedom is being challenged in states across the country; last year 53 bills have been introduced to state legislature to restrict teaching and research in higher education (Levenstein and Mittelstadt, 2022). States such as Florida, Texas, and Ohio passed bills that restrict DEI and other cultural touchpoints in higher education curricula even as political factotums are being named to the highest administrative positions at public universities, hundreds of colleges and universities are struggling with solvency issues (The Hechinger Report, 2020). Amid these large-scale concerns, the health and well-being of academic workers might not seem like a top issue. Still, given the widespread precarity of most academic workers, and the bleak financial climate at many higher education institutions, now is an important moment to evaluate how academic workers are treated and what lies ahead as they continue to age into their work—and to look at why they don’t switch careers, into healthier, in-demand industries.

Already, academic workers are more likely to delay retirement out of financial concerns. And, given the large number of non-benefitted at-will academic workers, there is a crisis on our hands for aging as an academic worker. While this issue is framed as a cost-basis problem for schools (or the government), I’m interested in understanding how academic workers navigate their institution’s wellness-related policies, such as different types of medical leave, short-term and long-term disability, FMLA, and other unpaid and paid policies. I want to survey academic workers to understand how these things work.

Navigating policies in any workplace can be challenging. My hope is that more research on academic workers leads to measurable and consistent reform in U.S. higher education that is better prepared for the kinds of precarious workers it currently hires, rather than tenure track ones it previously hired. Yet the individualistic nature of higher education makes it difficult, even among tenured faculty, to navigate job expectations and leave policies, especially during unanticipated health crises. Add to this erosion of worker benefits (e.g., retirement contributions, leave policies, and insurance plans) for staff and faculty, alike, and we are headed for a perfect storm of aging, ill, and disabled academic workers. We need better structures in place to prepare and to advocate for meaningful workplace policies and support.

 

 

 

 

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Links: Peculiar HUD programs, hydrogen energy, breakthrough therapies, and more!

* I spotted an interesting HUD program that covers a topic I’ve never or rarely seen the feds touch: “Increasing the Supply of Affordable Housing through Off-Site Construction and Pro-Housing Reforms Research Grant Program Pre and Full Application.” Four million dollars are available, with grants of $500,000 and five estimated awards. (Five times $500,000 is $2.5 million, not $4 million: feel free to ask HUD about the discrepancy). Still, the “Increasing the Supply of Affordable Housing” offers funding for research to “build the evidence base to accelerate the adoption of effective practices and policies to increase the production and supply of quality, affordable housing.” News that the housing crisis is primarily one of demand may finally be percolating through the federal bureaucracy.

What’s your favorite unusual grant program? Leave a comment with the answer.

* “US could soon approve MDMA therapy — opening an era of psychedelic medicine.” Better late than never. Banning MDMA by making it a Schedule I drug was a mistake when it happened and continues to be a mistake, and one that makes millions of people pay the price of our collective folly. “What MDMA Therapy Did For Me” is a passionate first-person account of using MDMA therapeutically, and it begins: “I did MDMA therapy. It was a deeply profound and life-changing experience.” And then: “I would rank it as one of the top 3 most important things I’ve done in my life, at least in terms of my personal development.” I of course, like you, have never done anything illegal, but “What MDMA Therapy Did For Me” is consistent with my own experiences.

* “I personally named my house and business after Silmarillion references – I would have named my car after one, but I learned my friend had named her car after it first, and that Steven Colbert had also named his car after it, and it would be weird to have all these cars named ‘Vingilótë’ driving around. At this point I backed off.” Would it be weird, or too weird? From “Contra Kriss On Nerds And Hipsters.”

* Rice cookers are great, underrated kitchen gadgets. I use mine (also a Zojirushi, if you’re wondering) all the time. It, combined with an Instant Pot, helps me make a lot of good, interesting food in a relatively short period of time, and without having to constantly check for doneness.

* A supposed breakthrough in stationary storage for hydrogen-nickel batteries. Emphasis on “supposed.” I’m not sure what the “catalyst” is, exactly, as described in the article. We’ve worked on some hydrogen grant projects and are cognizant of the potential benefits (here is us describing the DOE’s Hydrogen Shot grant program), but we’ll see how many breakthroughs materialize that can also be commercialized. Press releases are cheap.

* The great electrician shortage. It’s interesting to see this:

People who graduate from college do earn more, on average, than people who don’t, but the statistics can be misleading. Many young people who start don’t finish, yet still take on tens of thousands in education loans—and those who do graduate often discover that the economic advantage of holding a degree can be negated, for years, by the cost of having acquired it.

Those who skip college frequently do better, and not just at first.

While I’m not sure we’d have seen emphasized in this venue a decade ago, word about the problems of the “college for all” model is spreading. Better late than never. My main essay on this topic is here, from 2017, but it’s still relevant.

* Make parking impossible. We can choose to make the cities we want to live in through effective public policies.

* “How to Stop Environmental Review from Harming the Environment.” The National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) is having the opposite effect of what its creators intended. It often harms, instead of helping, the environment. Maybe we should fix that.

* 2023 geothermal update.

* California strip malls were upzoned last Saturday. The housing crisis is encouraging California politicians to take some relatively modest steps towards improvement, which are welcome, but more can and should be done. Property owners should be able to build whatever they (safely) want to. Don’t believe me? Visit Tokyo and observe the incredibly dense and creative land use planning that allows 36M folks to live in relatively affordable and good housing.

* Related to the link above: Developer could build hundreds, and maybe a thousand, apartments in Beverly Hills. Good. California needs more housing—a topic we’ve covered extensively, particularly because we’ve worked on so many California homelessness services and affordable housing grants—and the sooner California builds more, the sooner it can help get the homeless housed and make life at least somewhat affordable for the middle class. The California dream of inexpensive, sunshine-filled life was alive until NIMBYs brutally murdered it via zoning. Let’s bring it back.

* “Towards an enlightened centrism.” This is often what we aspire to: knowledge, information, understanding, and an avoidance of petty clannishness.

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How grant writers can use HRSA’s Uniform Data System (UDS) Mapper system: a post in honor of Service Area Competition (SAC) season

HRSA’s Uniform Data System (UDS) Mapper is powerful but also incredibly hard to use, and I suspect most people get stymied by its clunky user interface—and give up. The difficulty of using the UDS Mapper inspires me to write a guide describing how we tend to use it. “Giving up” is a legitimate reaction to software with a poor user experience and user interface, but giving up won’t help a HRSA needs assessment get done, and it won’t move your organization closer to being funded. Healthcare organizations like Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) in particular need to use the UDS Mapper. However frustrating the UDS Mapper may be, the UDS Mapper also collects healthcare indicator data not available anywhere else, and for that reason it’s useful not just in HRSA or healthcare proposals, but a wide range of other proposals.

If you look closely at the UDS Mapper’s output, you’ll see what I mean in terms of HRSA collecting data others don’t. The curiously named set of columns for the “health center penetration rate” in particular can yield insights into local areas; are people who are low income or living in poverty managing to access healthcare? I’m not aware of other places that collate such data. The Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) tab similarly gathers data not readily available elsewhere.

Right now, it’s also Service Area Competition (SAC) season, which means mabt FQHCs need to use the UDS tool, along with others like it, to prepare their SAC applications. We’ve written about the SAC experience in a bunch of places, including here, and we encourage organizations that are applying for SAC or other HRSA funding to contact us.

I developed the UDS Mapper guide to be used internally, but it occurs to me that others may find it useful, so I’m uploading it here. Questions or comments? Leave them below. This draft of our guide isn’t the last word.

Click here to download the guide.

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Links: Battery recycling, how to lower housing prices, the shift from colleges to apprenticeships, and more!

* The Dept. of Energy announces a $375 million loan for an automotive-grade battery recycling plant, which is sited for Rochester, New York. We didn’t work on this project, but we’ve written proposals for many adjacent DOE applications in batteries and other materials, so we know how arduous the underlying process for this one likely was.

* “More Students Are Turning Away From College and Toward Apprenticeships: Some white-collar training programs have become as selective as Ivy League universities.” This makes sense, for all the reasons I articulated back in 2017. There are also now programs like Western Governors University (WGU) that are designed to reward skills not time in seat. A lot of students presently in college probably shouldn’t be, and probably aren’t getting much if anything out of college—apart from debt. College isn’t the magic panacea it was made out to be for many decades; instead, college degrees were then relatively rare. Now they aren’t and, simultaneously, schools have reacted to the current student-loan environment by creating degrees that require almost no work and impart essentially no skills.

* “More Flexible Zoning Helps Contain Rising Rents: New data from 4 jurisdictions that are allowing more housing shows sharply slowed rent growth.” While this is obvious, there’s a weirdly large amount of denialism out there about the way increasing supply will over time lower prices.

* Looks like RSV vaccines will be available by next winter, which is great! Less illness is better than more.

* Closing Industry Frontiers, which compares the closing of the American frontier to the filling out of the Internet software industry over the last ten years. The next political frontier might be O’Neill habitats.

* Why the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) Deserves More Funding. Modern vaccine approaches may take out a large number of diseases in the 2020s and that’s great. The RSV note above concerns only one disease, but there are many others.

* One “secret” of writing is to write every day. (This is not really a secret: pros know it, but amateurs often don’t want to believe it.)

* “Lennar defies La Habra’s Measure X, files what could be ‘builder’s remedy’ application.” Building more housing is vital to improving human well-being, which is ultimately what the grant process is about, or what it’s supposed to be about.

* Is the college essay already dead? Maybe future essays are going to be written on computers without Internet access. Or, colleges could bring back the old school Blue Books!

* “US Cities Are Falling Out of Love With the Parking Lot: California and many local governments are scrapping requirements that once made cars the center of the urban landscape.”

* Bowdlerizing Roald Dahl and the Ethics of Art.

* “How to go car-free — or car-light — in Middle America.”

* “The educational skeptic’s guide.” There’s some quotable material in here for your next Dept. of Education proposal, although you’ll need to be judicious in your choice of quotes—which is almost always true when you’re questioning orthodoxy, however mild the questioning may seem. “Social desirability bias” (SDB) is a real thing, and a lot of educational improvement initiatives are bound up with SDB.

* “The Government Is Making Telemedicine Hard And Inconvenient Again,” which is bad for FQHCs and bad for anyone who needs healthcare (which is, over the course of a life, almost everyone).

* “Apartment Rents Fall as Crush of New Supply Hits Market.” Supply and demand matter, and homelessness is first and foremost a housing shortage problem.

* “Smaller, safer, cheaper? Modular nuclear plants could reshape coal country.” This would be a major step in the right direction, especially because coal plants tend to already have transmission lines and interconnect rights.

* “New Thinking on Peer Review at NIH.” Better peer review is welcomed. Like so many forms of institutional infrastructure that really got launched in the postwar period, “peer review” isn’t working well any more.

* Are parts of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department run by gang members? If you don’t want the reporting filter, the original report is here and says things like:

The Department currently contains several active groups that have been, and still are, engaged in harmful, dangerous, and often illegal, behavior. Some of these groups have engaged in acts of violence, threatened acts of violence, placed fellow Deputies at risk of physical harm, engaged in acts celebrating officer involved shootings, and created a climate of physical fear and professional retribution to those who would speak publicly about the misconduct of such groups.

Ever seen the TV show The Shield? I think that was about LAPD, not LA County Sheriff.

* Do nonprofits drive social change? Not according to this analysis, but nonprofits of a certain kind maintain a certain high status among certain persons.

* The efforts of geothermal power startup Fervo. We’ve worked on lots of geothermal energy projects.

* “Global Supply of Cocaine Hits Record Level, U.N. Says: Coca cultivation rose 35% from 2020 to 2021, new report says.” At what point does one decide that prohibition has failed, and it’s time to try a new strategy? Imagine that coffee were under the same sanctions as coca leaves.

* Oregon botches the decriminalization of drugs.

* “Review: The Best Minds, by Jonathan Rosen.” Another take on the book we previously wrote about, and which is germane to behavioral and mental health. Those of you who work in mental health will likely recognize some of the issues they face (excuse the length of this quote, but you’ll understand why by the end):

“The best minds” of the title refers to Laudor, who’s brilliant by wide affirmation and whose intelligence and intensity are now inextricable from his illness, at least in the popular understanding. But it also refers to the people who created the medical and social context in which the murder occurred – the mental health advocates who fought (and fight) against the effort to hospitalize patients who are psychotic or otherwise dangerous, the anti-psychiatry movement that has demonized treatment of debilitating medical conditions, the media that wanted to see Laudor in nothing but facile storybook terms and so of course could see nothing else, the various authority figures and community members who had enabled Laudor’s uninterrupted descent into madness because they thought it was the right thing to do, and the family members and friends who were unable to see how obviously, cripplingly sick he had become near the end.

Consider also this controversial take:

The biggest problem in American mental healthcare is not people getting stuck in the system but those who need to get in and can’t.

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Will we see involuntary confinement return, and what does that mean for mental health services grant writers?

The Atlantic has a long book excerpt titled “American Madness: Thousands of people with severe mental illness have been failed by a dysfunctional system. My friend Michael was one of them. Twenty-five years ago, he killed the person he loved most.” The story is about a brilliant man named Michael Laudor, who was also a schizophrenic and as a consequence of schizophrenia killed his pregnant fiancee while in the grips of delusion. The story is partially about what the author, Jonathan Rosen, calls “the wreckage of deinstitutionalization, a movement born out of a belief in the 1950s and ’60s that new medication along with outpatient care could empty the sprawling state hospitals.” Rosen says that:

During the revolutions of the ’60s, institutions were easier to tear down than to reform, and the idea of asylum for the most afflicted got lost along with the idea that severe psychiatric disorders are biological conditions requiring medical care. For many psychiatrists of the era, mental illness was caused by environmental disturbances that could be repaired by treating society itself as the patient

It turns out, however, that many psychiatric disorders are in fact biological conditions, rather than being caused by “environmental disturbances.”* The environment might exacerbate or mitigate some psychiatric challenges, particularly for things like psychopathy, but the psychiatric challenges remain. We’ve written grants for lots of mental healthcare providers that know how mental health challenges exist on a spectrum: someone with ADHD or many forms of depression might be addressable in a straightforward, outpatient manner, but schizophrenics and people suffering from other severe and persistent mental illnesses (SPMI, which is the current descriptor of choice in the grant writing biz) aren’t well suited to basic outpatient treatment. A lot of the online discourse around mental illness concerns people with issues that may be serious, but that are unlikely to result in fundamental breaks with reality, homelessness, and murder.

Rosen reports what I was discussing in the preceding paragraph—that some people don’t fit well into the outpatient model:

One problem was that nobody knew how to prevent severe mental illness; another was that rehabilitation was not always possible, and could only follow treatment, which was easily rejected. And despite having been created to replace hospitals caring for the most intractably ill, community mental-health centers, as their name suggested, aimed to treat the whole of society, a broad mandate that favored a population with needs that could be addressed during drop-ins

People with SPMI who aren’t involuntarily institutionalized often end up on the street, which is obvious to anyone who’s visited San Francisco, or parts of L.A., Denver, Seattle, or any number of other cities, which have been struggling with a combination of high housing costs, limited policing, and few tools to compel treatment. Rosen says that “The biggest improvements in people’s mental health can happen when they are involuntarily hospitalized, a psychiatrist who works with the homeless told me.” A lot of mental health services organizations and homelessness service organizations will admit as much in private—we know, because we’ve been on those calls—but they’ll almost never say so in public. Saying so is too incendiary, and too contrary to the hopeful messages of the ’60s, which still resonate in American culture today.

As a society, for various reasons, we’re not willing to have hard, honest conversations about tradeoffs and challenges. Freddie deBoer has a review essay of Rosen’s book that picks up these threads; he writes that “I look and look for some grappling with the messy, sad, sometimes tragic reality of mental illness in major media and I find nothing.” The reality is often not suited to the dominant narrative, and we’d prefer to ignore the reality. Foster family agencies are similar: they deal with issues that have no good answers and that most people would prefer not to think about. So most people don’t think about them.

Most people prefer not to think too hard about how to deal with SPMI, but reality can find its way through that preference to consider something else. Michael Laudor’s fiancee likely didn’t think she’d die by his hand, and preferred to think that she’d be okay, and that she could save him, when only medication, taken as scheduled, could. The severely and persistently mentally ill generally can’t be confined for more than a few hours or days until they commit a serious crime, even if their journey towards serious crime is evident to their loved ones.

We don’t yet know what happened to Cash App founder Bob Lee, who was murdered on the streets of San Francisco, but chances are SPMI played a role. It’s likely that his murderer, if he’s found, will have a long criminal history as well. The proximate cause will likely be something crime-related, or related to that particular day’s episode, but the ultimate cause will in part be that “dysfunctional system” Rosen writes of. Emergency rooms and police officers aren’t alone going to fix the system we have. Not even federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) and other kinds of behavioral health services providers will, or can. They can be part of the solution, but a big part of the solution has to be something we’ve not been willing to countenance since the ’70s. The alternative is the status quo: more Bob Lees and more murdered girlfriends. While Americans sort this out, the failure to deal directly with SPMI is contributing to the rapid decline of the quality in many cities. While San Francisco and Seattle are very beautiful, many folks will likely think twice before venturing to either for a vacation or conference, as they think: “who needs the risk?”


* Very few people today take Freud seriously, except as a storyteller, for obvious reasons.

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Interest rates are up and venture capitalists (VCs) are hurting, so companies are suddenly interested in government grants

Unless you’ve been completed sheltered from the larger financial and information ecosystems, you’ll know that interest rates have gone from “zero or near zero” during 2009 – 2021 to “much higher than that” (at the time of this writing, even the federal discount window rate is 4.75%). Consequently, the value of tech companies has been falling, the value of bank stocks has been falling (the market value of those banks’ bonds have dropped dangerously), and accessing capital has gotten dearer for almost everyone—including venture capitalists (VCs) and the limited partners (LPs) they raise money from.* That may seem like a point distant from the world of grants, but it’s not: since at least 2009, various parts of the federal government, most notably the Department of Energy and USDA, have vastly expanded the number of grants available not only for technology research and development (classic R&D), but for companies that are scaling and for manufacturing infrastructure.

Those grants, however, were less attractive than VC money for much of the 2010s, because VC money was so available: zero or near-zero interest rates meant anyone seeking real investment returns couldn’t get them from bank deposits, Treasury Bills (“t-bills”), or similar sources, so VC investing seemed like the best alternative to the stock market, as returns weren’t impressive from most other sectors. VCs took all that money and reinvested it in a huge range of startups—including ones related to solar, batteries, wind power, and more. Federal grants could still be attractive in the low-interest-rate 2010s environment—the linked post is from 2016—since those grants were non-dilutive and could fund some projects much earlier than VCs typically would. So grants had their place, but, at the same time, VCs also move a lot faster than the feds—I’ve seen claims that VCs sometimes make a fund / no-fund decision for early-stage startups within one to two weeks of first contact—and so a lot of companies preferred the VC route over the grant route. For much of the 2010s, too, it was obvious that solar, wind, and batteries were becoming and were going to be a big deal, which has by now become conventional wisdom.**

Things have changed in the funding environment: VCs are now having problems raising new funds, and some of their LPs are said to be balking at existing fund commitments. Tech stock values have dropped, and with them a lot of the angel investor funding that seeded the startup and scaling ecosystems. So the startups that two or three years ago would’ve gone for VC funding are now likely to be looking closer at grant funding. The total amount of grant funding available in some sectors has increased too, thanks to the recently passed Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Many of us—including me—have forgotten how much interest rates affect the macroeconomic environment, and few of us expected a global pandemic to allow an economic boom to continue, with only a few months of interruption. Supply chain problems persisted throughout the pandemic and arguably to this day, but the overall picture has been surprisingly rosy. We’ll see what happens if interest rates keep rising, we end up in a genuine bank crisis, and/or a recession.

Nonprofits aren’t immune to variations on the phenomena above: they’re probably seeing donations fall, along with the stock market and the larger set of economic jitters in most areas (except, interestingly, housing, which remains expensive: for decades, we’ve not been building enough, which means that there are substantial-real world shortages, and those legally mandated shortages affect everyone). But smart nonprofits have always cultivated both grants and donations; for R & D startups of the sort that might pursue Small Business Innovation and Research (SBIR) or similar grants, the calculations about grants versus VC money have always been different.


* “LPs” tend to be pension funds, university endowments, ultra-wealthy family offices, etc. These organizations have been reaping a disproportionate share of tech startup gains over the last fifteen years, and tech companies have been going public later than ever due to regulatory restrictions like Sarbanes-Oxley (“SarBox”), thus restricting the ability of average investors to make money in tech funds. A lot of well-intentioned rules and laws have perverse incentives built into them!

** Today, the biggest problem isn’t the raw cost of solar panels, batteries, or wind turbines—the biggest problem has instead become grid interconnect projects. That’s the bottleneck. “Environmental” laws like the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) are holding up projects that are good for the environment! NEPA is a law that really protects the status quo, at the expense of doing things better than the status quo, and that is bad. As is so often the case, the law does the opposite of its name.

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The end of SAMHSA’s “waivered prescriber” MAT requirement: a grant writer’s farewell

You could easily have missed it: in January, SAMHSA ended its waivered-prescriber requirement due to an obscure section of the recently passed Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill (BIL). Those of you who aren’t involved in the minutia of healthcare service provision and medication-assisted treatment (MAT) may read the preceding sentence and think: “What’s that about, and why does it matter?”* Until this year, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) required that doctors and nurse practitioners (NPs) / physicians assistants (PAs) who prescribe buprenorphine—the key medication used to treat persons with what SAMHSA and HRSA like to call “opioid use disorder” (OUD)—get a special DEA waiver. This “waivered prescriber” requirement had the effect of severely limiting the number of doctors and other healthcare providers who could offer MAT. So you’d have situations where a doctor could prescribe potentially addictive opioid painkillers like oxycodone, but not the buprenorphine that is used to treat OUD. Welcome to the upside-down world of American healthcare.

This waivered-prescriber process always seemed baffling, and it turns out that I’m not the only person who wondered about what’s so special about Suboxone and similar drugs: back in 2015, for example, Scott Alexander wrote that any doctor should be able to prescribe it, and he observed that Suboxone, the “(generally safe) treatment for addiction[,] is more highly regulated than the (very dangerous) addictive drugs it is supposed to replace.” MAT works way better than non-medication efforts, although not perfectly.

Dr. Alexander** notes that:

Suboxone treatment isn’t perfect, and relapse is still a big problem, but it’s a heck of a lot better than most rehabs. Suboxone gives people their dose of opiate and mostly removes the biological half of addiction” and that “Some people stay on Suboxone forever and do just fine – it has few side effects and doesn’t interfere with functioning. Other people stay on it until they reach a point in their lives when they feel ready to come off, then taper down slowly under medical supervision, often with good success.

So maybe taking a daily dose of Suboxone isn’t ideal, but it’s a big improvement on OUD. How many people reading this have a daily dose of coffee, tea, Yerba Mate, or some other caffeinated substance? Sure, we can say that tea makes us more productive, but, compared with street and prescribed opioids, doesn’t Suboxone?

Probably the “waivered-prescriber” thing should have ended much sooner—but that’s far from the DEA or FDA’s most egregious blunder in recent times. Studies find that “FDA Deregulation Increases Safety and Innovation and Reduces Prices.” Maybe we should collectively think more seriously as a society about the costs of government paternalism. The supplement industry, while not exactly a shining star of excellence, works okay without the FDA. People who find FDA approval valuable could choose to only buy substances with FDA approval; those who are FDA skeptics could choose not to. Most supplement buyers don’t appear to care about FDA proof.

In the meantime, regarding OUD and MAT, sudden deaths from fentanyl remain high in NYC—and fentanyl is often accidentally or intentionally mixed with non-opioid drugs like cocaine. This could be a legalization or decriminalization argument: black-market items rarely follow Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP).

Oh yeah, and it looks like naltrexone curbs binge drinking, apart from severe alcoholics. Estimates vary but most find that around 10% of Americans have an alcohol problem. There are also indications that semaglutide reduces the appeal of alcohol (here is one clinical trial examining that subject). In the last links post, we mentioned a monoclonal antibody that reduces amphetamine effectiveness. Although none of the anti-addiction medications s mentioned in this post are likely to alone solve concomitant addiction crises, they’re likely to help. We as a society have at least 50 years of experience in trying to resolve addiction crises without extensive medication-assisted treatment, and the results are apparent. The “War on Drugs” hasn’t worked. Talk therapy and 12-Step programs are better than nothing but don’t work all that well on their own. I guess we’re now at the stage where we’re trying MAT more seriously, and soon we’ll be at the stage where we try psychedelic therapy (sample clinical trial, but there are many others). Trying something new when the old isn’t working makes sense at a personal and a societal level.


* If you or anyone you know has struggled with what’s now referred to as “opioid use disorder,” it matters a lot.

* He’s a psychiatrist.

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Writers for the HUD “Community Development Block Grant Program for Indian Tribes and Alaska Native Villages” (ICDBG) program

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced the “Community Development Block Grant Program for Indian Tribes and Alaska Native Villages” (ICDBG) Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) on June 22, and the program is interesting to grant writers who work with Indian Tribes and/or Alaskan Native Villages in part because of how much money is available: $75 million for 80 grants of up to five million each. That’s enough to fund a substantial eligible project, including affordable housing.

Like its cousin, the basic “Community Development Block Grant Program” (CDBG), ICDBG grants can be used for a wide array of affordable housing, economic development, and community development projects provided that the project concept meets one or more of the CDBG statutory “National Objectives”. For example, conforming to one CDBG National Objective may be demonstrated through a “low-moderate income” benefit test, which is a finding that the use of CDBG funds benefits at least 51% low- to moderate-income program beneficiaries. This “purpose” is often used to justify CDBG applications, because it’s fairly easy to demonstrate—unlike some of the others. “Easy to demonstrate” is attractive for grant writers working on “Community Development Block Grant Program for Indian Tribes and Alaska Native Villages” applications.

Overall, Indian Tribes and Alaska Native Villages should consider applying for this grant, as strong applications have a very good shot at being funded, due to the number of grants available relative to the number of Indian Tribes and Alaskan Native Villages. Interestingly, applicants can also seek “Imminent Threat Grants,” although the ICDBG NOFA is vague about what that might entail. Nonetheless, if your Tribe or Alaskan Native Village has anything going on that could qualify as imminent threat, you should apply. One novel approach, particularly for Alaskan Native Villages that are potentially threatened by rising sea levels, might be to claim “climate change” as an “imminent threat.”

Because of the importance of developing a strong application, contact us to learn more about how we can write your entire ICDBG proposal or edit your draft for a reasonable flat fee. As grant writers, we can not only make sure you have a strong application, but that your application process is easy. If you look at Adobe pages 38 – 40 of the NOFO, for example, you’ll see that a considerable amount of narrative material is required, including a needs assessment, an extensive description of the applicant’s ability, and a description of how the project will provide appropriate benefits.

The “Community Development Block Grant Program for Indian Tribes and Alaska Native Villages” (ICDBG) also doesn’t require any matching or cost sharing. Health facilities can be constructed, as can correctional facilities or land acquisitions.

Overall, the virtues of ICDBG are notable for not only grant writers but also for Indian Tribes and Alaskan Native Villages.

HUD ICDBG writers

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Grant writers and the USDA’s “Rural Energy for America Program” (REAP)

The Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) “Rural Energy for America Program” (REAP) is unusual because of the size of the program (which grant writers will note): it has $1 billion dollars available for up to 9,000 grants—but with an award ceiling of just one million. One million? That’s for grants only, however, and loan guarantees go much higher. In other words, a lot of organizations are going to apply for REAP funding and and many will be funded. Still, the “Rural Energy for America Program” (REAP) is doling funding out over six quarters, rather than all at once. I’m not wholly sure why USDA chose this structure, but it seemingly has. There’s no formal deadline, because the Dept. of Agriculture will accept REAP applications throughout the year, but that can leave applicants in the dangerous position of deciding that they’ll do their application “next month” forever. The “we’ll do it next month” thing is one of the essential challenges with open application of the “first come, first served” variety. Applicants who see a Notice of Funding Opportunity (“NOFO,” which is USDA-speak for RFP) like this can face a dilemma: if you apply early, the project concept may not be “cooked,” but if you wait too long, the funding pool may become exhausted.

If you’re thinking about applying to the “Rural Energy for America Program” (REAP), call us at 800.540.8906 ext. 1, or contact us: we’re grant writers, and it’s our job to help make your USDA REAP proposal preparation process simple. Few small businesses or agricultural producers are familiar with the grant-seeking and grant-making processes, but we sure are, and we’ve worked on a variety of USDA clean energy and rural-focused projects. One favorite recent project in the agricultural-services sector involved a hog-processing plant in the Midwest; our client knew a huge amount about slaughtering hogs and selling ham but nothing about grants. We learned a lot about hogs, and our client learned a bit about grants, as we helped them submit a technically correct and compelling proposal with a minimum of fuss and bother on their part. To stretch the hog analogy a bit, Seliger + Associates is the fully cooked ham of grant writers: just heat ‘n serve—or, I should say, just hire ‘n submit.

In terms of REAP, one slight downside to the program is cost sharing: applicants need to contribute at least half of the total project budget. As we’ve written about before, however, matching funds for grants are often not all that hard to find. The actual eligible REAP activities are variable: they include doing “energy audits” (which is a classic “process” activity that is close to free or “walkin’ around” money), but also the installation of actual energy improvements and energy efficiency systems. That last one is probably where the bulk of the money is.

Eligible applicants must be either “agricultural producers” or, alternatively, “rural small businesses.” The relevant federal regs at “§ 4280.112 Applicant eligibility” also cite site control as being important. So REAP is a very specific and very targeted funding program (wise grant writers check eligibility requirements carefully), but a lot of farms, other agricultural producers, and rural small businesses are looking into solar, batteries, and related systems anyway. Geothermal is probably not quite at the stage where smaller organizations can deploy it, and ditto for wind, so I’d guess solar is likely to be the main beneficiary of REAP right now.

Another peculiarity of the USDA’s “Rural Energy for America Program” (REAP) program is that applicants need to get the application package itself “by contacting the RD Energy Coordinator” for the applicant’s home state. That’s an unusual choice; normal federal grant applications make the application package readily available on grants.gov or elsewhere. Still, with $25 million maximum loan guarantees and $1 million maximum grant requests, dealing with unusual structures will be worthwhile for many applicants.

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Links: Homelessness and housing, mental illness treatment, technology grants, and more!

* The NYT notices how poorly L.A.’s Prop HHH went. We talked about some of its problems back in 2017; writing the proposals themselves was good, but, at the same time, it was hard not to recognize the real-world challenges in L.A.’s vetocracy (a portmanteau not original to me, alas). You can’t fix homelessness or housing problems without comprehensive zoning reform, and ideally zoning reform that eliminates the charade of “community input.” Whatever value “community input” may once have had, it’s morphed into a system of “just say no” that exacerbates the housing crisis and lets a small number of unrepresentative persons block almost anything from happening, anywhere.

* Strangely, at least to my eyes, the Department of State (DoS) is offering $250,000 in Building Back Better (BBB) funding to…Canada? This is a real grant opportunity, listed in grants.gov. The grant program purpose is to “promote sustainable and inclusive economic recovery that strengthen the middle class, with a focus on women, people of color and Indigenous peoples, including in the Arctic.” Most DoS RFPs focus on developing countries in Africa, the Middle East, and so on—not Canada, which is not a country that I think of when I think of countries that need U.S. foreign aid. Another RFP is designed for “Advancing Diversity and Inclusion” in Canada, which, relative to many countries, doesn’t strike me as bad at diversity or inclusion. The total grant amounts are low, but my own curiosity factor is high. Does Canada run programs to promote economic recovery in the United States? Does Canada worry about us? Should they?

* Why don’t doctors study the clitoris? From the NYT. I assume nurses and physicians assistants don’t either, which is a peculiar omission for medicine, since medicine is supposed to be the study of the body, and the ability to heal it, too.

* Human challenge trials are a good idea. Much greater freedom in this area is laso a good idea.

* Actual mental illness is not a meme. This is something many of our mental health and substance abuse service clients likely already understand, but there’s a media and social media universe that is pretty removed from the actual treatment provision.

* Chips and China.

* Taiwan prepares to be invaded. Somehow, this does not seem like great news.

* An overview of concrete forming technology. Concrete is in almost all infrastructure and is thus of high importance; most people, myself included, overlook it most of the time.

* “The End of Vaccines at ‘Warp Speed:’ Financial and bureaucratic barriers in the United States mean that the next generation of Covid vaccines may well be designed here, but used elsewhere.” Important news that isn’t getting the attention it should.

* Open-source hospital price transparency.

* New meth treatments are possible. I’m not sure how optimistic I am, given that opioid treatments are useful but hardly a panacea, but something is still better than what we have now, which is “nothing.” Some of our substance-abuse treatment clients have been seeing an uptick in the use of Naltrexone and related medications for alcoholism. We’ve also not exhausted the possible uses of monoclonal antibodies (the proposed meth treatment is a monoclonal antibody), which is also important and notable.

* Illiberal values.

* More on loneliness. Consider weaving ideas about loneliness into your proposals.

* Despite all the blah blah blah you read about “clean” energy, world coal use reached a new high in 2022. Solar, wind, batteries, and all these things are good—we’ve written many proposals to get projects in those fields funded—but the first two are intermittent and the last only stores power. There is currently no good alternative to nuclear power; failure to focus on nuclear means we’e going to burn more coal and emit more methane.

* Why is progress in biology so slow? One of these really important questions, which seldom dominate the news.

* “Income inequality has been falling for a while now.” In this reading of the data, anyway.

* “The Truth about Demographic Decline:” most people want more kids than they feel they can afford to have. This is another instance of exclusionary American housing policy creating scarcity in many domains, including this one.