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Links: The online ad bubble, funny RFPs, college grads and job training, the nature of behavioral health, and more!

* “The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising.” One could alternately ask, “What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?” The answer seems to be, “Not much.” The idea that many companies throw away tens or hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and in some cases more, seems barely believable.

* One of my favorite recent RFPs is for “Strengthening U.S.-Ukraine Business Relations while Addressing Social Issues through ‘Serious Game Jam.'” That’s from the Dept. of State, and it has $100,000 to “introduce U.S. companies to the Ukrainian gaming industry and promote good corporate governance by creating a platform for U.S. developers to collaborate with their Ukrainian counterparts on tackling social issues through ‘serious games.'”

* You may have heard that 41% of college grads are working jobs that don’t require the degree. What should this do to our view on college for everyone, as a panacea to our economic woes? In other education news, “U.S. Higher Education Has a Foreign Money Problem“—but this is mostly the rich, highly marketed schools. Having been a part of higher ed for a long time, I favor a much stronger push towards apprenticeships and vocational education. Lots of people don’t like sitting still and doing abstract symbol manipulation, and we should stop pretending that those personality traits are key to a meaningful life.

* “The evidence for evidence-based therapy is not as clear as we thought.” That shouldn’t, for now, stop you from citing CBT, MET, etc. in your SAMHSA proposals. It still seems, however, that we don’t really know what makes therapy work or how it should work: we’re still leaping in the dark. Colorado, however, looks like it will, in November, decriminalize psychedelics, and a number of research projects are using psychedelics for therapy.

* Owning a car hurts your health. “Beijing has limited the number of new car permits it issues to 240,000 a year… Those permits are issued in a monthly lottery with more than 50 losers for every winner.” Older winners gained more than 20 pounds, compared to the control group of non-winners. Given COVID-19 social distancing and fears, it may be a while until mass transit gains its recent luster.

* Book Review: Just giving. I was surprised by the first quarter of the review and didn’t see the shift coming, although in retrospect I should have.

* Why the US sucks at building public transit. If we could get better at this, we could slash many households’s transit costs and thus free up more money for anything and everything else. Except for endless COVID-19 news, which is scaring most people off of public transit, even though wearing masks on public transit appears to prevent COVID from spreading.

* “Why Japan is obsessed with paper.” I have complained periodically about American publishers not being obsessed with paper at all, and the crappy paper quality used in most books. The New York Review of Books books are among the notable exceptions.

* “In the Future, Everything Will Be Made of Chickpeas.” One hopes. A pressure cooker helps.

* “In Philanthropy, Race Is Still a Factor in Who Gets What, Study Shows.” This is the New York Times, after all.

* For over a decade, the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico has been the epicenter of the American oil boom. Now, it’s the epicenter of its demise. I’ve read versions of this article a couple times already. The Permian Basin could be going back the back economic times that served as the backdrop for the book, movie, and great TV series, Friday Night Lights.

* Can genetic engineering bring back the chestnut tree? If so, that would be great news: chestnuts produce lots of cheap food and good wood. And, then there’s Jurassic Park style dinosaurs. Maybe they’ll love to eat genetically engineered chestnuts.

* The Early Days of China’s Coronavirus Coverup. If not for Chinese censorship, the rest of the world might have been much better prepared.

* The new language of telehealth. Maybe.

* “Exclusive: Tesla’s secret batteries aim to rework the maths for electric cars and the grid.” Maybe. It does seem that nickel and low-cobalt batteries are coming. The second-life systems are also hugely impressive: one rarely appreciated reason to pick electric vehicles is that their batteries can be repurposed for grid storage when the car itself reaches end-of-life. Here is one story on how “Millions of used electric car batteries will help store energy for the grid.”

* Cities are transforming as electric bike sales skyrocket. It is now possible to buy very good electric bikes for $1,500 retail and less-good ones for about $1,000. In this case, COVID-19 terror should help.

* The pandemic is bringing us closer to our robot takeout future?.

* MacOS 10.15: Slow by design. Thankfully I haven’t “upgraded,” although this is not an actual upgrade. We have written periodically about how we use Macs at Seliger + Associates, but we may need to re-think that usage given Apple’s direction.

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Generalized human and social services: ACF READY4Life and Fatherhood FIRE RFPs

Astute newsletter readers saw two useful Administration for Children and Families (ACF) Office of Family Assistance (OFA) RFPs with lots of money available (albeit with overly long names) in our last edition: Fatherhood – Family-focused, Interconnected, Resilient, and Essential (Fatherhood FIRE) and Relationships, Education, Advancement, and Development for Youth for Life (READY4Life). Both have grants to $1.5 million for family formation and resilience services. A phrase like “family formation and resilience services” should make smart nonprofit Executive Directors sit up and take notice, because we’ve seen fewer overt generalized human services grants over the past few years—the kind of grants that we sometimes call “walkin’ around money.

Smart organizations figure out that these kinds of grants can be used to fill in the cracks of an organization’s budget, because the project concepts that can be funded are broad. Also, in most cases, only a process evaluation (e.g., number of outreach contacts made, number of referrals, etc.) is feasible, since there’s usually no way to tract outcomes. In the ’90s and ’00s we saw more broad, general-purpose RFPs, but we’ve seen fewer since the Great Recession. The feds seem to have lost interest in many kinds of general-purpose grants and have instead been targeting particular services, like primary health care and job training.

Many organizations are already doing things like fatherhood and family development, but without calling their activities “fatherhood and family development.” Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), for example, often serve low-income patients who are impoverished by single parenthood, usually in a female-headed household. Nimble FQHCs should apply for READY4Life, Fatherhood FIRE, and similarly nebulous grant programs, since they can re-brand their existing Case Managers and Patient Navigators as “Family Support Coordinators” and “Parenting Specialists.” Obviously, the FQHC wouldn’t say as much in the proposal—that would be supplantation—but, in the real world, a lot of organizations keep their lights on and their clients happy using these strategies.

Organizations apart from FQHCs should be doing this too. Job training and homeless services providers, for example, often work with populations that need family reunification training, and the organizations are already often providing wraparound supportive services. Funders love synergistic proposals that say things like, “We’re going to do job training services for ex-offenders, and those ex-offenders will also be eligible for Fatherhood FIRE services in order to ensure that they remain in their children’s lives.”

Increased funding for generalized human services typically follows some kind of seismic societal shock. Seliger + Associates began in 1993, soon after the Rodney King verdict civil unrest, which was soon followed by the onset of mass school shootings with Columbine. Then came the Great Recession: the feds respond to social turmoil with huge new grant programs (21st Century Community Learning Centers was an example) and big budget increases for existing programs (like the 2009 Stimulus Bill). With the COVID-19 crisis, the cycle is repeating. Since March, three giant stimulus bills have been passed, with at least one more likely. The enormous civil unrest and protests unfolding after the recent police killing of George Floyd will likely lead to grant programs too; the feds’s objective is to get grants on the streets quickly to nonprofits, which act as a kind of buffer to politicians.

With growing “defund the police” sentiment in big, left-leaning cities, politicians are engaging in a sort of bidding war with proposed police budget cuts; politicians say some version of, “We want to redirect huge amounts of police budgets to solving the underlying problems that generate crime.” Translated, this means, “We plan to fund local nonprofits to conduct some kind of human services.”

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Grant writing in another time of civil disturbances

Once again, I find myself writing grant proposals during a time of tragic civil disturbances across America.* My entire life and career have been shadowed by such events. I came of age in the 1960s, a time of extreme social unrest, both race-related—like the 1965 Watts Rebellion—as well as often violent anti-Vietnam protests. I went to my first civil rights march in Paducah, KY in 1965 (my older brother was working for the then-new Job Corps there) and participated in many anti-war marches while in college at the University of Minnesota. As I wrote about in my first GWC post in 2007, “They Say a Fella Never Forgets His First Grant Proposal,” I got my grant writing start working as a community organizer in North Minneapolis in 1972. I grew up in North Minneapolis, when it was a Jewish, trending Black, ghetto, and the community was devastated by what were then called “race riots” in 1967 and 1968. In 1972, my job was to try to get some local businesses going again, as North Minneapolis hadn’t recovered—and, in many ways, it still hasn’t recovered.

In 1992, the genesis of what ultimately became Seliger + Associates was born out of the ashes of the civil disturbances following the Rodney King verdict. I happened to be visiting friends in the Hollywood Hills when the disturbances began, and we could see the fire burning across South LA and Koreatown that night from their deck. Based on my experiences over the years, I assumed that huge amounts of federal grant funds would follow soon, and that it might be a good time to ditch my career as as city-slug community development director and try setting up a grant writing business instead. I did just that in 1993 and discovered that there was indeed a market for good grant writing consultants. The timing was also propitious because the incipient Internet allowed us to work for people across the country in a way that wasn’t possible before it.

Flash forward: in 2014, I wrote a post about about grant writing and the Ferguson, MO civil disturbances in which I noted that grant money follows major incidences of civil unrest. The government only has two real tools to use in this situation: the stick of yet more policing (the problems of which are readily observable in the news) or the carrot of grant funds to help the affected communities recover.

As I write this, civil unrest is unfolding from Minneapolis to NYC, LA, and much of the rest of America, following the obvious, videotaped murder of George Floyd.** These horrific images are juxtaposed with the inspiring images of the first manned SpaceX/NASA launch. It’s very troubling to realize that, while much has changed since I was a high school freshman in 1965, some things haven’t; then, I was listening to Barry McGuire’s huge hit single, “Eve of Destruction“: “You may leave here for four days in space, but when you return it’s the same old place.” The reference is to the Gemini 4 flight and civil rights marches/violence of the era. Feels like we’re poised on another Eve of Destruction.

Unlike Ferguson in 2014 and LA in 1992, today’s situation is more like the huge unrest that followed MLK’s assassination in 1968 in that it has radiated out to more than 40 cities and, after five nights of burning and looting, shows no sign of abating. This is unfolding after months of COVID-19 lockdowns, and those most harmed by both the virus and the lockdowns have been low-income communities of color. I’ve worked in and around these communities for over four decades: when the lockdowns began, I thought and discussed privately (but not in a post) that this could lead to great civil unrest. I wasn’t talking about the gun guys marching in front of state capitols, but rather what erupted last week in Minneapolis. While I couldn’t predict the spark, I suspected civil unrest would follow. Force millions of low-income workers to stay at home in overcrowded housing, while their jobs and incomes evaporate, and this outcome should not be surprising. If it wasn’t George Floyd, it would have been something else. I read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time when I was a teen and it rings true today: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water but fire next time.”

The combination of civil unrest and tens of thousands of small businesses closing in places like South Minneapolis and Flatbush in Brooklyn will be devastating for years and possibly decades to come. As noted in a recent New York Times article, “According to one recent poll, nearly 40 percent of adults living in cities have begun to consider moving to less populated areas because of the outbreak. In New York, where I live, roughly 5 percent of the population — or about 420,000 people — have already left.” For the near term, gentrification and densification of cities, big and small, is over.

Still, the twin scourges of COVID-19 and civil unrest will present great grant opportunities for nimble nonprofits, cities, and other public agencies. The three COVID-19 relief bills passed so far are raining over $2 trillion on the country, much in the form of grants, with a fourth bill likely to pass soon. We’ve been writing COVID-19 proposals furiously for two months and know that at least $2.4 million in COVID-related grants we’ve written has already been funded. The inevitable huge increase in available federal grant money, due to the civil unrest, will soon follow. If you run a nonprofit, city department, or school district, once you’re done mourning for George Floyd and recovered from the shock of COVID-19, be ready. The grant waves this time will likely center on primary health care, behavioral health services, workforce development, and economic development. It’s not inconceivable that we’ll eventually address the underlying pathologies that have bedeviled American history since before the country’s founding. But I’ve been hoping for that for decades and it remains elusive.


* For purposes of this post, I’m focusing on the negative aspects of what’s happening, not the legitimate underlying protests against police brutality. I’ll leave the details of those issues to others, while noting that police unions create systemic challenges around dealing with police misconduct; the Supreme Court’s doctrine of qualified immunity is the other challenge. The date stamps on both those links are from years ago; knowledge about these problems has circulated among intellectuals and policy nerds for years.

** On a personal note, I took my Golden Retriever to doggy day care Sunday morning, which I do most Sundays. The store, Posh Pet, is just off the part of Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood that was trashed Saturday night. When I got there, I found this sign in the window: “We have dogs here. Please don’t break window.” The glass door was smashed and the business completely looted. No idea what happened to the dogs being boarded. This small business was barely hanging on, due to COVID-19. Now, it may never reopen.