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Grants.gov and the GAO, Volunteer Broadband Reviewers for BTOP and BIP, Job Retraining, Grant Writers, and More

* 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 is particularly amusing: “Grants.gov has made it easier for applicants to find grant opportunities and grantors to process applications faster, applicants continue to describe difficulties registering with and using Grants.gov, which sometimes result in late submissions.” It’s true, but I’d note regarding the first part that while it’s easier to find grant opportunities, it’s still often not easy; for example, searching using Google’s restricted site feature is often faster and better than using Grants.gov’s built-in search function.

* Speaking of which, I like this headline: Contract to Upgrade Recovery.gov Stimulates Criticism.

* William Easterly explains Sachs Ironies: Why Critics are Better for Foreign Aid than Apologists:

Official foreign aid agencies delivering aid to Africa are used to operating with nobody holding them accountable for aid dollars actually reaching poor people. Now that establishment is running scared with the emergence of independent African voices critical of aid, such as that of Dambisa Moyo.

* The Dept. of Commerce and USDA must be really desperate if they’re requesting volunteers to review applications. We’re writing a Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP) and a Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) application, which makes this announcement salient to us.

* The Services for Victims of Human Trafficking program (warning: .pdf) has an unusual deadline feature: it gives 7/13/2009 as the deadline for “Online Registration,” and 7/16/09 for the application itself. But smart applicants should move both those back by at least two days to avoid the inevitable rush.

* Now here’s a great idea for a government requirement: New bill wants fiber conduit built into every road project:

The bill would require new federal road projects to include plastic conduits buried along the side of the roadway, and enough of them to “accommodate multiple broadband providers.” Conduits must meet industry best practices for size and depth, and road builders must include hand holes and manholes along the route to gain access to the conduit. Each conduit will also include a pull tape for fishing new fiber through the line.

Most of the cost to deploy new fiber is the digging and repaving work, so putting in conduit when the ground is already torn up has a certain logic to it. It’s a relatively cheap idea, but one that Eshoo hopes will help US broadband.

Given the lousy shape of U.S. broadband deployment, which Ars Technica has covered in depth, that help would be much appreciated.

* Job Retraining May Fall Short of High Hopes, says the New York Times. This is the kind of article you would never cite in a job training proposal, unless it’s to knock it down, in which case you shouldn’t cite it in the first place. Nonetheless, those of you running job training programs ought to read it.

* Uber-geek publisher and all star Tim O’Reilly (I own a few of his technical books) on The Benefits of a Classical Education.

* Ars Technica reports that GE is throwing its weight behind smart grids. That’s probably good news for Smart Grid Investment Grant Program (SGIG) applicants.

* Ed Glaeser encourages us to put trains where the people are. That this isn’t self-evident is indicative of federal involvement.

* I hadn’t realized it till now, but two years ago the Wall Street Journal published “A Passion for the Keys: Particular About What You Type On? Relax — You’re Not Alone” regarding the fanaticism certain people feel for their keyboards. As writing a review of the Model M-inspired Unicomp Customizer taught me, I am very much note alone. Anyone who spends a lot of time typing should read both articles; even better, they might like this review of the Kinesis Advantage ergonomic keyboard.

* According to “Tax Breaks Under the Microscope” in Slate, nonprofit hospitals are much like their regular counterparts:

But research shows that nonprofit hospitals behave no differently from for-profit ones. And in some cases, nonprofits have been caught mistreating the poor for the sake of financial gains. One example: A nonprofit academic hospital in Connecticut aggressively pursued “deadbeat” elderly patients by placing liens on their homes. More recently, several nonprofit Chicago hospitals were reportedly transferring uninsured patients to the county emergency room.

* State governments are behaving with even less foresight than usual; according to a Salon post quoting the San Jose Mercury News, “In 1980, 17 percent of the state budget went to higher education. By 2007, that had fallen to 10 percent — the same as prisons and parole.” And 2007 predated the current crisis, showing that the trend away from higher education funding is accelerating.

* In one of many bizarre twists surrounding stimulus funding, California’s El Dorado County has rejected $1.6 million in stimulus funding:

The Board of Supervisors last week twice rejected what staff members described as no-strings-attached funding.

“It’s as close to a no-brainer as I’ve ever seen come before this board,” Richard Meagher of the Affordable Housing Coalition of El Dorado said of a grant application that could have put local contractors to work rehabilitating foreclosed houses and made the dwellings available to moderate and low-income homebuyers.

But Supervisor Jack Sweeney characterized himself as a “free-market person” and argued that many current economic ills are a result of government’s intrusion into society.

This seems bizarre even by the standards of local government. I’d bet that Sacramento Bee reporter Cathy Locke either knows something she couldn’t write about or that there’s otherwise something deeper beneath this story.

* Fascinating: Japan and Korea’s hidden protectionist measures prevented U.S. companies from competing in their home markets, and the English-language press largely ignored the story. Compare this to the story told in David Halberstam’s The Reckoning.

* Gas and the suburbs.

* New York remains rich in the ultimate resource: human capital. But the high cost of housing and high taxation levels remain threats. This is by one of my favorite economists, Edward Glaeser.

* Self-esteem has gone up in the United States; achievement has not.

* If The Onion wrote stories about grant titles, I wouldn’t know whether to believe Grants to Manufacturers of Certain Worsted Wool Fabrics is a real program or something dreamt up by satire writers.

* More porn means less rape? Maybe, and the writer cites some experiments that exploit natural variations, a lá Freakonomics, to get there. Expect to hear more on this subject in the coming years.

* I found Developing And Writing Grant Proposals while searching the other day, and love the sometimes-comical advice they give. It starts in the second paragraph, which says “Individuals without prior grant proposal writing experience may find it useful to attend a grantsmanship workshop,” a topic Isaac has dealt with, as have I.

* Megan McArdle writes about When Blogs Were Young. Compare that to my post, “You’re Not Going to be a Professional Blogger, Regardless of What the Wall Street Journal Tells You,” which is by far the most visited of any we’ve published.

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Bratwurst and Grant Project Sustainability: A Beautiful Dream Wrapped in a Bun

In many if not most human services RFPs, you’ll find an unintentionally hilarious section that neatly illustrates the difference between the proposal world and the real world: demanding to know how the project will be sustained beyond the end of the grant period. Every time a funder asks this question, the answer is always the same: the applicant will seek donations from businesses and individuals of goodwill in the community and will maintain an active grant writing effort to find and apply for grants at the local, state, and national levels. That’s the core of the answer, anyway, although it can be expanded or contracted as needed.

To show why the answer is always the same, remember that there are only four basic ways that nonprofits get money:

  • Grants/Contracts: If you’re reading this, you probably already know that nonprofits can apply for grants from various governmental agencies and private foundations, as well as enter into fee-for-service contracts for services like substance abuse treatment and foster care.
  • Donations: Usually nonprofits will solicit donations to the extent they can, and occasionally a large one will drop in their lap. While there are always donors to be found, the number of donors with serious bucks they’re willing part with is very, very small, and has probably shrunk considerably over the last year of economic crisis. As with casinos in Las Vegas, every nonprofit is looking for the whales, but there are just more perch out there than whales.
  • Charging for Services: Some nonprofits can charge fees or collect membership dues. Fees are almost always charged on a sliding scale, and not all nonprofits can charge fees and still engage in their charitable purpose. For example if an agency provides case management services for the homeless, fees are out of the question. YMCAs and Boys & Girls Clubs usually charge membership dues but raise relatively little revenue, particularly in low-income communities. Community health clinics charge on a sliding scale and accept Medicaid/Medicare but exist to provide primary care to the indigent and, as a result, cannot refuse service because of an inability to pay.
  • Investment Income: Some very large nonprofits have endowments that provide a steady source of investment earnings, provided they did not invest with Bernie Madoff, but this is the exception for most garden variety nonprofits. Universities often have endowments, but even then they keep begging for money from alumni, so this revenue stream is hardly a panacea even if it were available.

For the vast majority of nonprofits applicants, the first two are it: grants and donations. If we know this simple truth, how come foundation and federal program officers seem clueless? If the agency had the couple hundred thousand dollars sitting around to fund a given program, it wouldn’t need the grant and wouldn’t apply.

Furthermore, the major cost for most human service providers are staff salaries and other operating costs. So it’s improbable that you’ll just need a bunch of money to get off the ground; although startup costs are real, they’re still dwarfed by staffing and ongoing operations costs in most cases. There might be a hypothetical dream project out there, somewhere, that just needs that DHHS grant to get started and then can run indefinitely off of revenue, but we’ve never seen it.

Maybe the presumption that human service programs are sustainable comes from science grants, where once you get that million-dollar electron microscope you can run an effectively infinite number of trials, or where once you commercialize that protein you’ll be able to earn a stream of patent revenue. But human services don’t work this way: you need someone standing there imparting some skill or ability or, as the name implies, service. Not all science grants have high one-time costs and low ongoing costs, but more work this way than do human services grants.

To recap: salaries and operating expenses are the major costs of most human service delivery programs, and if you had the money to sustain a grant you wouldn’t need the grant in the first place. That’s why the sustainability section of most proposals is almost entirely fictitious: the funder wants to imagine that it’s planting grant seeds that’ll grow indefinitely, when in reality the grant is the water, not the seeds, and as soon as you cut off the water, the program usually dies, only to reborn again when another grant stream comes along. This is one reason why, in almost every proposal we write, the project concept is called “innovative,” no matter how many times the agency or other agencies have implemented the same concept.

Within this sad reality, some nonprofits sometimes come up with interesting and innovative (there’s that word again) fundraising alternatives; for example, one of our Wisconsin clients decided to raise funds by operating a bratwurst stand in front of their office. We have no beef with that and at least it uses local pork instead of D.C. pork, but note that, over the long term, bratwurst might not be the most stable funding source. In addition, selling bratwurst competes with for-profit hot dog carts and depends on volunteers to prepare and sell the brats—in other words, it’s just a variation on bake sales and car washes.

In addition, I’m trying to imagine someone with a Carol M. White PEP program or another physical activity/health grant selling brats, since eating brats is probably antithetical to the healthful purpose of the program itself. In fact, like Big Tobacco, if you sell enough brats, you will eventually kill off your supporters. Our Wisconsin client let us know that the recently completed Madison Brat Festival “sold a record 208,000 brats, and contributed over $100,000 to local charities!” No word on the impact of all of these brats on rising local health care costs due to coronaries, but I think I’m smelling a great grant proposal idea more than a grilling brat. This frank tale illustrates one of many conundrums of nonprofits: it’s all well and good to testify at a public hearing that the local school district is killing kids with junk food, but when it’s time to raising money, most nonprofits will opt for selling brats over tofu dogs. Also, it doesn’t hurt to have the local high school cheerleading squad do the selling for you, but we don’t know if that’s part of the Madison effort.

Still, federal programs continue to ask about sustainability even in the sheer improbability of genuine sustainability actually occurring. You can see it in the Department of Labor’s Green Capacity Building Grants (warning: .pdf):

Applicants should provide a complete description of their strategy to sustain the core training and placement activities in their project after grant funds are expended.

And you’ll see it in others. Just make sure you answer the question according to the proposal world rather than the real world—unless you’re going to make your bread by selling brats.

We already exposed the secrets of matching funds, and this post represents another brick in the common proposal question wall. In the future, we’ll also discuss another typical question from clients and others: how much money should you ask for in a grant? The maximum? The minimum? Somewhere in between? Stay tuned for our answers to that and other vital grant writing imponderables.

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On the Subject of Crystal Balls and Magic Beans in Writing FIP, SGIG, BTOP and Other Fun-Filled Proposals

I’ve noticed a not-too-subtle change in RFPs lately—largely, I think, due to the Stimulus Bill—that requires us to drag out our trusty Crystal Ball, which is an essential tool of grant writing. Like Bullwinkle J. Moose, we gaze into our Crystal Ball and say,”Eenie meenie chili beanie, the spirits are about to speak,” as we try to answer imponderable questions. For example, our old friend the HUD Neighborhood Stabilization Program 2 (NSP2) wants:

A reasonable projection of the extent to which the market(s) in your target geography is likely to absorb abandoned and foreclosed properties through increased housing demand during the next three years, if you do not receive this funding.

How many houses will be foreclosed upon, but also absorbed, in our little slice of heaven target area in 2012? If I was smart enough to figure this out, I’d be buying just the right foreclosed houses in just the right places, instead of grant writing. People much smarter than us who were predicting in 2005 how many houses they’d need to absorb in 2009 were tremendously, catastrophically wrong, which is why we’re in this financial mess in the first place: you fundamentally can’t predict what will happen to any market, including real estate markets. Consequently, HUD’s question is so silly as to demand the Crystal Ball approach, so we nailed together available data, plastered it over with academic sounding metric mumbo jumbo, and voila! we had the precise numbers we needed. In other words, we used the S.W.A.G. method (“silly” or “scientific wild assed guess,” depending on your point of view). I have no idea why HUD would ask applicants a question that Warren Buffett (or, Jimmy Buffet for that matter, who may or may not be a cousin of Warren) could not answer, but answer we did.

You can find another example of Crystal Ball grant writing in the brand new and charmingly named Facility Investment Program (FIP), brought to us by HRSA, which are for Section 330 providers (e.g. nonprofit Community Health Centers (CHCs)). We’re writing a couple of these, which requires us to drag out the ‘ol Crystal Ball again, since the applicant is supposed to keep track of the “number of construction jobs” and “projected number of health center jobs created or retained.”

I just lean back, imagine some numbers and start typing, since there is neither a way to accurately predict any of this nor a way to verify it after project completion. HRSA is new to the game of estimating and tracking jobs, so they make it easy for us overworked grant writers and applicants by not requiring job creation certifications. Other agencies, like the Economic Development Administration (EDA), which has been about the business of handing out construction bucks for 40 years, are much craftier. For instance, the ever popular Public Works and Economic Development Program requires applicants to produce iron-clad letters from private sector partners to confirm that at least one permanent job be created for every $5,000 of assistance. We’ve written lots of funded EDA grants over the years, and the inevitable job generation issue is always the most challenging part of the application. HRSA will eventually wise up when they are unable to prove that the ephemeral construction and created/retained jobs ever existed. Alternately, they might wise up when they realize the futility of the endeavor in which they’re engaged, but I’m not betting on it.

This tendency to ask for impossible metrics is always true in grant writing, as Jake discussed in Finding and Using Phantom Data, but sometimes it’s more true than others. I ascribe the recent flurry to the Stimulus Bill because more RFPs than usual are being extruded faster than usual, resulting in even less thought going into them than usual, forcing grant writers to spend even more time pondering what our Crystal Balls might be telling us.

Since the term “Crystal Ball” began popping up whenever I scoped a new proposal with a client, I got to thinking of other shorthand ways of explaining some of the more curious aspects of the federal grant making process to the uninitiated and came up with “Magic Beans,” like Jack and the Beanstalk. We’re writing many proposals these days for businesses, who have never before applied for federal funds, for programs like the Department of Energy’s Smart Grid Investment Grant (SGIG) Program, and the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) of the National Telecommunications & Information Agency.

When scoping such projects, I am invariably on a conference call with a combination of marketing and engineer types. The marketing folks speak in marketing-speak platitudes (“We make the best stuff,” even if they don’t know what the stuff is) and the engineers don’t speak at all. So, to move the process along, and to get answers to the essential “what” and “how” of the project concept, I’ve taken to asking them to, in 20 words or less, describe the “Magic Beans” they will be using and what will happen when the magic beans are geminated after that long golden stream of Stimulus Bucks arcs out of Washington onto their project. This elicits a succinct reply, I can conclude the scoping call, and we can fire up the proposal extruding machine.

So use your Magic Beans to climb the federal beanstalk and reach the ultimate Golden Goose, keeping your Crystal Ball close at hand.

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Tools and Organizing Organizations: How to Wrangle Information and Databases for Grant Writers

Once you have a sufficiently large agency with concomitantly large grant writing needs and multiple funding sources, you’re going to start facing problems of scale. This means a single person is going to find managing all the efforts of the agency steadily harder, and that single person will eventually be overwhelmed. If you’re big enough, you’ll probably need to hire a programmer to roll out a custom database front-end or install a wiki for you; if you’re big, but not quite that big, a white board and calendar would suffice.

This post comes in response GWC reader Joe Orozco’s queries. He’s the Associate Grants Manager for Youth Service America in Washington D.C. and wrote to ask:

I am a huge fan of your blog and wonder if you might use it to discuss database options for grant writers. Here in my current position I prepare proposals for different departments in our office, and with folks not fans of MS Access, I am forced to use large unwieldy spreadsheets. What database or organization strategy do you use to separate and maintain data for different grants by client, or in my case, department? Thank you in advance for any information you can provide. Please do keep up the excellent work on Grant Writing Confidential.

We’re very susceptible to flattery, so we appreciate the compliments. Even better than that, he asks interesting and unusual questions, which we also like to get.

Isaac initially wrote back to say:

I assume you are interested in proposal preparation data issues, not grant management. If so, the short answer is to dump your PC and go to Macs. Mac OS X 10.5 (or “Leopard”) has a built in feature called Spotlight, which can instantly find anything on your hard drive. All you need to do is remember key words. Thus, no need to catalogue proposal info in a database. We still have a couple of old PCs and use Access for mailing lists and the like, but not for proposal management. If you are good at file management and organize proposal writing assignments into folders, and get a Mac, your life will be much easier. FYI, about six years ago, we tried to use Access for grant preparation data management and gave up. To do so, you will need a database programmer to set up the databases for you. Of course, the programmer will know nothing about grant writing, so this won’t help either.

For old school management techniques, let me take you back to 1978 when I had a job like yours. In the days before computers, I used a huge white board to track proposal status, along with a slotted accordion file sorter that sat on top of a horizontal file cabinet for paper files, and a phone sheet to track conversations. I have feeling this would work as well for you today and it did for me all those years ago.

But I wasn’t so sure this would meet the desired needs, so I suggested:

To coordinate what 20 people need, I’m not sure how I would run a database. You could probably install Apache and search tools on a single machine and turn it into a local server, but that might be overkill. For a relatively small group using a LAN, attaching a Drobo (http://drobo.com/), auto-mounting it on your computer, naming folders in a way that makes sense, and indexing like Spotlight might be ideal. But that’s just my imagination at work.

Joe replied:

Unfortunately, I am tied to a PC environment here. Spotlight does indeed sound like what I may be looking for, but to expand a little on my previous correspondence, each program in our office pursues different grant opportunities depending on the specific nature of their work. I am currently using a spreadsheet to break down information by department and their respective funders. I’m not as interested in other people having the capacity to find information. I just need something less cumbersome than a spreadsheet to keep track of various reporting calendars. I decided to write to you, because I was a fan of your tools of the trade blog post. Everything from the type of office chair to several monitors was covered, and I am hopeful that a bone will be thrown to us lowly PC users who cannot take advantage of the wonderfulness that appears to be Spotlight.

Also, on a minor unrelated point, what kind of blogging tool do you use in your web site? I like the way you’ve seamlessly integrated your blog into the scheme of your web site!

And, as for the blog:

We’re on WordPress, primarily because I began using WordPress to write The Story’s Story and so was familiar with it. Adhost, a business ISP, hosts all our sites and actually has seliger.com on a different machine than https://seliger.com, but a link goes from the latter to the former and I customized our theme to make the blog and regular site look similar. If you’re thinking about starting a blog and can’t afford Adhost—who have been very, very good and reliable over the years we’ve used them—consider Laughing Squid. I’ve heard good things about them.

Microsoft Access

Joe did mention Access in his original e-mail. No one actually likes Microsoft Access, but there is one big advantage to it: it’s the worst desktop database system except for all the others. Like democracy, it’s the least bad choice, unless FileMaker Pro has dramatically improved since version 8. If he still wanted to use Access, a competent database person could probably tie it to a website relatively quickly, easily, and cheaply.

Networked Drobo and Spotlight

If Joe was going to coordinate everything on a local machine or using the Drobo suggested above, Spotlight might do the trick. We do love Spotlight, but even it isn’t perfect; if you have a vast array of data, you might get inundated, and it still doesn’t have boolean commands from the default Spotlight prompt (So you can’t type “Youthbuild -California -Wisconsin”, for example, and get every Youthbuild proposal that doesn’t mention those two states. This can help refine queries.)

Calendars and Whiteboards

One other useful technique is a big calendar on which you write upcoming deadlines for programs. For the program itself, write the letter of intent (LOI; if necessary) and final deadline on the board, then set up subsidiary deadlines: this is when we need a go/no go decision; this is when we need a first draft; this is when we need the budget; this is when we need letters of support; and so forth.

The calendar will quickly fill up, but if you’re in a single, central location you can’t miss the deadlines looming down on you. You don’t have to check a webpage. It’s all in front of you, and if Steve walks by, you can grab him, point to the upcoming HRSA deadline and ask him where the hell those letters of support are. If Jessica wants to apply for a Dept. of Justice (DOJ) program, she can come by, pick up a marker, and decide where the deadlines should go, and you’ll be looking at each other and the board rather than a computer screen.

If you’re a giant organization with hundreds of people who need to review and edit applications, you’ll outgrow these tools. But if that’s the case, you’ll also want to hire dedicated IT people or technical consultants to set up these kinds of systems, because such systems are inherently complex and have lots of small user-interface issues that aren’t going to be easy to solve. But for most of us, some combination of a Spotlight-like system, a whiteboard, institutional memory, a subscription to the Seliger Funding Report, and a calendar will probably suffice.

If Joe writes back to say what, if anything, he’s done, I’ll post his experiences as an edit to this post.

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Fake Grant Writers, Spammers, Scams, Community Spec’s Ryan Reeves, and Resource Associates

Attention grant writing consultants of the world: if you can’t even write your own website text, you’re not going to be very believable as a writer of any kind.

I point out this obvious fact because various people have copied our website over the years. Alert reader and grant writer Shirley Nelson of Grant Strategies showed us a recent example in the form of “Community Spec, Inc.,” which I’m not going to dignify with a link. Until very recently, their front page said:

CSI staff have over 15 years experience in successfully writing grants for clients in over 28 states across America. We differ from other grant writers in that we use a turn-key approach. Our clients only have to give us general direction and sign the completed grant applications. We do all the rest, including the program design, needs assessment, narrative, budget and final submission package.

Does that sound familiar? If you’ve ever been to the Seliger + Associates homepage, it should:

…We have been in business since 1993 and have had over 500 clients in 42 states.

Seliger + Associates has written over $200,000,000 in funded grant applications. We differ from other grant writers in that we use a turn-key approach. Our clients only have to give us general direction and sign the completed grant applications.

We do all the rest, including the program design, needs assessment, narrative, budget and final submission package.

In response, Isaac called Ryan Reeves, who was listed as the contact person for Community Spec. At first Isaac left a message with a secretary, and within an hour the offending Community Spec website disappeared. At the time of this writing, however, parts of the site are still available through Google’s cached version.

A day later, Ryan called back to claim that a) his site had been up for five years and b) he hired a web designer, who wrote the text for the site. The latter claim is particularly interesting, since when we hire web designers, we give them the text, not vice-versa. There are two unflattering possibilities in Ryan’s claim: he either plagiarized and then lied about it or is too incompetent to write his own text. The most hilarious part of the call came when he said that he wanted to “work with us” on the issue.

Doing so is really quite easy: don’t plagiarize our material.

I can’t imagined that Community Spec is long for this world.

In any event, if the copied website weren’t enough to tip off potential clients or workers, the e-mail Ryan Reeves sent to Shirley ought to be another clue. He’s trying to hire contractors based on the websites of other grant writers, apparently trying to position himself as a broker. If that’s the best way he can find employees, he’s doing something wrong. Other consultants aren’t looking to be hired as contractors for third-parties; they’re looking for clients of their own, and unsolicited junk isn’t much appreciated. As Shirley wrote in an e-mail, “I am also annoyed by competitors that spam my e-mail box looking for grant writers. The most notorious was Resource Associates.”

[REMOVED FOLLOWING LEGAL THREATS FROM RESOURCE ASSOCIATES AND DEBORAH MONTGOMERY; it appears, however, that Deborah Montgomery herself is not part of Resource Associates anymore. That has to be an improvement.]

If you’re Ryan Reeves of Community Spec, don’t copy our stuff, and if you do, don’t blame it on your web developer. If you put it on the Internet, you’re responsible for it. And if you’re reading this, remember that there are plenty of questionable and shady characters in grant writing, and you don’t want to associate with them.