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More networking, less working: DHHS’s “No Wrong Door Community Infrastructure Grants” RFP

The Administration for Community Living just issued an RFP for what appears to be a new grant program: No Wrong Door Community Infrastructure Grants, which offers grants “to support the development and enhancement of Network Lead Entities (NLEs) which are providing key access functions within a community such as coordination of information and referral, screening, care coordination, care transitions, eligibility and enrollment, and person centered planning.” If your eyes glaze over and you’ve quit reading already, I understand—all those verbs are abstract, and none say something like “construct new housing” or “offer opioid treatment.” They’re all process objectives and no outcome objectives; applicants don’t need to show or pretend to show that 70% of participants held a job six months after the end of project participation.

But if you’re a wily nonprofit executive director, you’re probably stroking your chin and thinking about whether you can round up a herd of partners to apply. No Wrong Door is mostly of interest because it appears to be a “walkin’ around money” program: applicants spend time “networking” and “building networks,” which usually means taking people out to lunch, holding catered meetings, strolling into other organizations with boxes of donuts, hiring new staff people (who can ideally do some direct service delivery as well, but quietly), and so on. At the end of the project, there’ll be a report describing how amazingly successful all that networking has been, and how the network will strengthen the community’s capacity to do all kinds of marvelous and wonderful things in the future, none of which are measurable. When the funding stops, ideally the staff will be trained to do some other useful stuff for the organization that hired it. That’s why this is walkin’ around money for nimble nonprofits that understand the word salad from the RFP quoted in the first paragraph.

A lot of organizations are really sustained with this kind of “glue” funding, which plugs other revenue gaps and allows it to operate more effectively than it would otherwise. Grants like No Wrong Door help pay for services to people whose reimbursements cover 85% of the costs—not 100%. Don’t be fooled by the No Wrong Door description. If you’re a nonprofit, and you can get some letters of support from the usual suspects in your service area, this is the kind of grant that’s easy to overlook but can be surprisingly valuable.

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