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The Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) Notice Inviting Applications Finally Appears

NOTE: The Notices Inviting Applications (NIA) for Fiscal Year 2011 are now available. It took the Department of Education a year and three months to issue the second round, but I suppose that’s better than never.

Subscribers to our e-mail grant newsletter saw that the Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) RFP was (finally) released on Friday by the Department of Education, with a deadline of May 11. We’ve already written about i3 twice, including a post about its similarity to other Department of Education programs, like Goals 2000. We’ve also found one nasty trick in the RFP in our first reading.

Virtually every Department of Education RFP has a section at the start that clearly states what types of organizations are eligible applicants. This one doesn’t. Instead, the i3 RFP says on page 8 of 29 that:

Applicant means the entity that applies for a grant under this program on behalf of an eligible applicant (i.e., an LEA or a partnership in accordance with section 14007(a)(1)(B) of the ARRA).

What’s a partnership? Are nonprofits on their own eligible? If you find section 14007 in the American Recovery and Relief Act full text, you’ll see that the legislation is completely clear that an eligible entity is:

(A) a local educational agency; or
(B) a partnership between a nonprofit organization and—
(i) one or more local educational agencies; or
(ii) a consortium of schools.

(Emphasis added.)

So an LEA has to be involved for a nonprofit to apply, but presumably several schools could apply even if their respective districts were not involved in the project. Interesting, but curious. The text at the very beginning of the RFP lists the entities blockquoted above but doesn’t specifically say they are the eligible organizations. There are probably other gotchas too, despite the fact that ARRA was passed in February 2009. We first wrote about i3 in November 2009. The proposals won’t be reviewed until July 2010—almost 18 months after ARRA, which was designed to provide immediate stimulus fund to the economy, passed in Congress.

Another notable aspect to the i3 application process is that the grant writer has to understand the relevant sections of 407-page ARRA, the 29-page RFP, the 76-page application with lots of complex forms, and (get ready for it) the 212-page Final Priorities Notice. While i3 is a great opportunity with tons of money up for grabs, preparing a technically correct proposal will be fantastically complicated and not for the faint-of-heart or inexperienced grant writer. If you’ve never written a Dept. of Education proposal before, this is not a good starter. Isaac uses three monitors as a matter of course; I use two; but you probably need five to have all these documents open at once. Writer beware.

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