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Los Angeles tries to overcome Urban Doom Loop with new Hollywood Boulevard streetscape: this approach almost never works

The City of Los Angeles recently announced plans to “renovate” the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the world-famous 1.3-mile section of Hollywood Boulevard centered on the Chinese Theater. Pretty much every tourist who first visits Los Angeles walks along Hollywood Boulevard trying to figure out who Charles Bickford was (hint: great character actor with two stars, one for movies and one for TV, but largely forgotten except for folks like me who love classic films and Turner Classic Movies). And all stop in the Chinese Theater Courtyard to measure their shoes against John Wayne’s boot prints (surprise: he wore a size 6 boot!).

I first explored the Walk of Fame when I moved to LA in the mid-70s. Back then, it was a dirty but exhilarating cacophony of tourists, hookers, druggies, failed actors, Hare Krishna, and insane traffic, with it’s parade of cruisers on weekend nights. My pals and I would go there at night to catch a movie, have chocolate sundaes at the long-gone CC Browns Ice Cream, and enjoy the scene before going west for music at the Roxy and Whiskey on the Sunset Strip. In the mid-80s I owned a house in the Hollywood Hills right above Hollywood Boulevard and would take my kids to see movies like Tremors and Honey I Shrunk the Kids at the Chinese, Pacific, and Egyptian Theaters. After moving to Seattle in the ’90s, I’d often stay at the Rosevelt or W Hotels on Hollywood Boulevard when I came back on business trips. As chaotic as it was, it was fun and I never felt unsafe. But, as Bob Dylan put it, Things Have Changed: 

“The Hollywood Walk of Fame has become overrun with homelessness and violent crime, leaving tourists and locals feeling unsafe. The iconic LA landmark, once the epitome of glitz and glamour, is disappointing visitors with its dirty sidewalks and repulsing locals who have experienced violent attacks.”

The City of LA solution is to “rejuvenate the iconic strip’s sparkle with a much-needed renovation including wider sidewalks and more trees.” This is a classic government response to an Urban Doom Loop that rarely works. Think about it: wider sidewalks provide more room for more homeless and more trees are likely to make folks feel less safe as there will be more places for bad guys, real or imagined, to hide. Still, cities find this kind of hardscape improvement irresistible as it gives the appearance of doing something (“the Do Something Disease”), while providing photo ops for politicians at ground-breaking and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Examples are legion.

  • The basic “improve the hardscape” concept is a classic progressive ideal (as in early-20th-Century progressive, not today’s progressives): people are essentially good so it must be the environment they’re forced to live in that creates problems. This led to a cascade of federal laws and programs, starting with the New Deal era Housing Authority Act of 1937 to build public housing, the Housing Act of 1949 that brought us wholesale slum clearance and urban renewal (more properly termed “urban removal”), the Housing and Community Development Act of 1964 that created HUD, the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 that established Section 8 housing, the Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) program started in 1977, the 1987 McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act that setup the Continuum of Care (CoC) system, and so on.
  • When I was Economic Development / Grants Coordinator for the City of Lynwood, CA in the late ’70s, the “white flight” following the 1965 Civil Unrest in adjacent Watts left the City with almost no retail and lots of vacant buildings like closed Montgomery Wards and Sears stores. Even with large redevelopment subsidies, I was mostly unsuccessful in attracting new retail, but I wrote many grants for hardscape improvements, including bike lanes; renovating the City’s indoor Olympic-sized pool, a closed relic of the glory days of the 50s and unused because the City lacked the funding to hire lifeguards; and new restrooms to replace the closed ones in the City parks. The last was my favorite; we had a big ribbon-cutting on a Friday, and by Monday, the new restrooms were so badly vandalized that the restrooms had to be closed again. Just before I left for a new job, we got a new City Manager who thought the solution was to adopt retail boulevard design guidelines based on the then-popular Marin County weathered wood storefronts, but he was fired before implementing this bit of hardscape lunacy.
  • From 1981 to 1991, I was Redevelopment Manager for the nearby City of Inglewood, which also had lost most retail due to white flight. Before I arrived, the City had created storefront design easements along downtown streets and paid for the installation of blue awnings for no apparent reason other than that the City Manager liked them. When I assumed the position, I found blocks of vacant storefronts, second-hand stores, storefront churches, etc., with dilapidated and torn blue awnings! Among the many hopeless projects I was given were finding a new retailer to take over a vacant department store that the City had previously bought in hopes of keeping the tenant operating; propping up the City’s last two car dealers, Cadillac and Porsche, before they fled; and trying to convince Circuit City to open up a store on free city land (I was told by their national real estate manager that Inglewood “didn’t have the right demographics”). I ended up working on many useless streetscape projects and loan/grant programs for imaginary retail users. I did manage to negotiate a deal for the second Price Club (forerunner of Costco) in the LA area on land we condemned and sold for almost nothing, but had to relocate hundreds of low-income African American families and demolish their housing in the process (in the spirit of urban renewal, “one must break a few eggs to make an omelet”).

Since 1993, S + A has written many funded economic development, community development, and redevelopment grants, mostly for cities. Taking us back to the top of this post, about 25 years ago we wrote a funded $4M HUD grant for the City of LA to build the parking structure under the then-proposed Hollywood Highland Shopping Center adjacent to the Chinese Theater and Walk of Fame. The Shopping Center was a much-ballyhooed project, as it sits above a B-Line Metro Station, and was one of the first large-scale transit oriented development (TOD) in LA. The planners and politicians, however, failed to take into account who actually takes subways in LA— mostly moderate- and low-income workers, since the city remains almost entirely car-dependent. Few affluent folks are going to take the Metro to a random shopping center, as it’s much easier, faster, and safer to drive. Then along came rampant homelessness, organized shoplifting, and street violence, with COVID being the final straw. The Hollywood and Highland Shopping Center was vacant for three years until a private equity outfit bought it and spent $100M to renovate it (only in LA could a 20-year-old, massively-subsidized shopping center need renovation).

Perhaps the now-reopened and renamed Ovation Hollywood will be bolstered by the Walk of Fame renovation, but I doubt it— homelessness and crime continue to grow and Metro ridership is still only 80% of what it was in 2019. And the Los Angeles Times  recently reported: “With crime up and ridership down, Metro struggles to move homeless people off trains”. Would you spend over an hour taking the Metro from Santa Monica via DTLA to get to Ovation Hollywood for some shopping and a movie? Quite an urban adventure, especially at night, and not for the faint of heart.

The good news for you grant-seekers and us grant-writers is that there will soon be a flood of new federal, state, local, and foundation grant programs to tackle Urban Doom Loops in LA and other cities, large and small. Put on sunscreen and wax your board, as it will be a grant Surfin’ Safari right after the 2024 election, no matter who wins.

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2023 Grant Writing Post-Mortem: The Rise of DEIA and Department of Energy Community Benefit Plans

As 2023 has stumbled to a close, a grant writing post-mortem is in order.

Having written grant proposals since dinosaurs walked the earth (mid-70s, but close enough), the process remains relatively the same, except now we use computers instead of a legal pad* and the Internet instead of endless trips to the library. So, like the Talking Heads song Once in a Lifetime, it’s the “same as it ever was.” This is because very little has changed in how human services are delivered, how capital projects get built, etc.—outreach and case planning are still conducted in the same ways and site control and a building permit are still needed for construction. So, we develop project concepts in much the same way as I learned decades ago and the proposals look about the same when printed. But, 2023 introduced a new obsession with all things Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA): virtually every federal RFP we see these days requires some form of DEIA discussion, often quite extensive, in the project narrative, no matter the program purpose or target population. This may include President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative, which is nominally about environmental justice but is used as DEIA shorthand in some RFPs.

Writing about DEIA concepts in proposals, however, is not new, as these are just different words for old themes. In the late ’70s, I was the Grants Coordinator for the City of Lynwood in LA County, which had transitioned from almost 100% white pre-Watts Rebellion in 1965 to almost 100% African American by the time I got there. I quickly learned that threading in variations on what was then usually called institutional racism (e.g, the “400 years of oppression causes all problems” argument) was a winner and I larded it into every proposal I wrote for Lynwood, and later for the City of Inglewood, another mostly African American community, where I was Redevelopment Manager in the ’80s.

Since S + A started business over 30 years ago, we’ve continued to use similar arguments in needs assessments, modified for such other target populations as Hispanics, LGBTQ, etc. It doesn’t matter much who the population is because, like college professors and reporters, most grant reviewers are Democrats/progressives. They are steeped in the oppressor/victim construct and we write to their expectations, since our job is to get our clients funded. It’s fairly easy to manipulate data to support this gestalt. Case in point: some years ago we wrote a funded $2M California state grant proposal for an affluent city in Orange County to build a new youth center. The RFP was aimed at funding facilities for low-income, at-risk youth of color, but this was an upper-middle-class, mostly white city. What to do? Since Mission Viejo had a small but rapidly growing Asian population, we were able to carefully manipulate/obfuscate** census data, other data, and anecdotes to create the illusion of need, which is all that a needs assessment actually is.

Since DEIA is now ubiquitous, we must often go through some narrative contortions to apply the concept, particularly if the project concept or target area have little, if anything, to do with this issue. For example, we write many proposals for clients in rural Appalachia, which is very low-income but almost 100% white. So, the needs assessments discuss applying DEIA to imaginary residents, since everyone knows that DEIA is usually not applied to poor white folks, just like the violent protests across America following the recent horrific attack on Israel show that intersectionality is rarely applied to Jewish folks, no matter what other characteristics beyond religious affinity they may have. Still, this slight-of-hand writing should not be hard for an experienced grant writer.

Due to the avalanche of funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and similar appropriation bills, we wrote many Department of Energy (DOE) proposals in 2023. The DEIA obsession is evident in DOE FOAs (DOE-speak for RFP), which not only require that DEIA be addressed in project narratives, but also require that long-winded Community Benefits Plans (CBPs) be attached. We recently completed a DOE proposal—the FOA was 90 single-spaced pages, including about 15 pages devoted to the complex CBP instructions, but the project narrative response was limited to nine single-spaced pages, while the CBP had no page limit. This creates a classic “tail wagging the dog”*** writing challenge.

Newsflash to DOE: no matter what the proposal topic, all CBPs will be relatively the same because the “solutions” are all about the same. This is very similar to many HUD proposals we used to write. Up until a few years ago, these required an attachment similar to CBPs: a discussion of how the project related to Section 3 of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1968: “The Section 3 program requires that recipients of certain HUD financial assistance, to the greatest extent possible, provide training, employment, contracting and other economic opportunities to low- and very low-income persons, especially recipients of government assistance for housing, and to businesses that provide economic opportunities to low- and very low-income persons.” CBPs are just Section 3 Plans by another name with a soupçon of DEIA. All Section 3 Plans read more or less the same, as do CBPs, and I could convert a HUD Section 3 Plan we wrote 20 years ago into a DOE CBP fairly quickly. I don’t think anyone actually read a Section 3 Plan and doubt if anyone will read a CBP. Also, these would be very hard to enforce, as the goals, objectives, and activities are very nebulous and few federal agencies still conduct program audits.

Since most of our DOE clients are for-profits, including some Fortune 500 companies, they are unfamiliar with the grant-seeking process and terrified of the CBP requirement. When we scope the proposal project concept, we talk them off the ledge and draft their CBP as part of the assignment. The fun part is that not a single DOE client seems to care about the CBP, except that they know they must submit one to get funded. When drafting a CBP, we usually get the company’s DEIA statement/policies to incorporate. Second fun fact: these also read about the same, which means they’re likely boilerplate, written by the army of DEIA consultants that have emerged. From a grant-writing perspective, DEIA discussions and CBPs are just friction in the system. This should be obvious, since discrimination has been banned by federal, state, and local laws since 1965, and Affirmative Action has existed since the Nixon administration. But, the Golden Rule in grant writing is that the people with the gold make the rules, so the need to incorporate DEIA will continue until Congress replaces it with a similar requirement.

* I got so good at writing proposals by 1979 that I was able to dictate them to my secretary who knew shorthand (Millennials and Gen Z can google “shorthand”).
** While S + A is a master of data manipulation and obfuscation, we never intentionally include any untruths or fabrications in our proposals and neither should you.
*** The 1997 movie, “Wag the Dog” is worth watching.

 

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Good news for FQHCs and Look-Alikes: HRSA will issue the first New Access Points (NAP) NOFO in years on Dec. 12!

It’s been about seven years since the Health Resources and Services Administration issued a New Access Points (NAP) Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO). That’s a long dry spell for Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) and their Look-Alike brethren, but fear not, the FY ’24 New Access Points will be published on December 12.*

There will be $150M up for grabs, with 230 $650K/year grants for five years to be made, and the deadline will be February 12. I have no idea why HRSA has not issued any NAP NOFOs for years, but, if your organization is an FQHC, LookAlike, or wants to become an FQHC, I’d get on this NAP NOFO bus—who knows when the next NAP NOFO bus will come along.

By way of background, to be eligible for a NAP grant, the applicant has to be, or agree to set-up, a nonprofit “Health Center” under Section 330 of the Public Health Service Act (42 USCS § 254b), or, as they are termed in the trade, a Section 330 provider/FQHC. Without getting too far into the weeds, the mission of FQHCs is to provide access to patients who are eligible for public insurance programs (e.g., Medicaid, etc.), are very low-income, or lack health insurance. Although services are nominally provided on a sliding scale and no one is supposed to be turned away, Section 330 providers have to keep the lights on and, like all health care providers, they prefer patients with third party payers. Still, in much of low-income urban and rural America, FQHCs have become the healthcare providers of last resort.

We’ve written many funded NAP grants and this is the best way for an FQHC to open a new service delivery site, or if you’re a Look-Alike or other nonprofit healthcare provider, become an FQHC. While the Section 330 grant only covers about 15% of operating costs for most of our FQHC clients, this is a key component of funding healthcare services for underserved folks over the long-term. Also, FQHCs are covered by FTCA federal malpractice insurance and participate in the 340B Program  for reduced prescription drug costs, both huge competitive advantages over non-FQHC providers.

NAP proposals are very similar to Service Area Competition (SAC) proposals, which FQHCs must submit every three years to keep their Section 330 grants. This means a NAP proposal is very complex to draft and must be nearly perfect to be funded, as there will many more applicants than the 230 grants to be made. So, it’s best to start planning your NAP application as soon as possible. Also, if your internal grant writing team is either not quite ready for prime time or stretched too thin, hire Seliger + Associates to do the heavy lifting. We’re tanned, fit and ready to rock ‘n roll.

*This link is from a non-government site but includes info you find at grants.gov if you do a search. Since this is a “forecasted” grant opportunity, the actual NOFO won’t be available on grants.gov until December 12, so set a “tickler.”

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Urban doom loops mean that a new “Grant Wave” is forming

Many nonprofit and local government executives think that federal and foundation grant funding priorities are relatively static, but they’re not—we’ve written about grant waves before, and a massive new grant wave is forming just over the horizon. Unlike sudden funding shifts due to unanticipated disasters such as COVID, or a major hurricane like Katrina, grant waves develop over time as the legislative and executive branches react to emerging challenges. The new and building grant wave is one I’ll call the “Urban Doom Loom Grant Wave.”

The media is filled with Urban Doom Loop stories like “The risk of an urban doom loop for America’s old-line cities: Ailing metropolitan centres need creative solutions from the public and private sectors.” This article gets two major points wrong and one correct:

  • First Wrong Point: It’s not just “old-line” cities that are at risk of economic implosion, as this can happen to any city, old-line or new. By old-line, the author refers to “San Francisco, Chicago, New York.” Urban economic woes, either historic or current, can be demonstrated using various metrics, one of which is simple population increase vs. decrease. Chicago’s population, for example, peaked at 3.6M in the 1950 census, declined to 2.7M in 2020 and is down to 2.6M in 2023. A case can be made that San Francisco, which the tech revolution has transformed in recent decades, is more of a “new-line” city than an old-line city. Still, its population peaked at 874K in 2020 and has dropped 17.7% to 715K in 2023. While this simple change metric ignores underlying factors like the incomes and other socioeconomic indicators of who’s moving in and out, it’s one approximation of local economic health—people tend to move toward job opportunities, affordable housing etc. But the median sale price for a San Francisco housing unit is $1.4 million—hardly a sign of doom, although prices are down about 8.5% in 2023 from 2022.Population obviously isn’t a perfect metric. Seattle and Portland, which appear in daily apocalyptic news stories about crime, are both new-line cities. Leaving aside the “if it bleeds it leads” aspect of news coverage, both seem to be facing significant economic and quality of life challenges, which are reflected in modest population change: Seattle’s population has dropped by 1.7% and Portland’s by 2.8% since the 2020 Census. One reason population growth or decline is a fair measure of urban vitality is that a city’s public and private infrastructure (e.g., roads, transit, office/retail buildings, housing stock, etc.) grows as the population grows. Expanded infrastructure is a “spent cost” and public and private infrastructure must be maintained even if the tax base and lease/rent revenues fall. In the short- to medium run, this inevitably means higher taxes and/or lower services, which are strong feedback loops for the Urban Doom Loop phenomenon. Detroit, for example, has lost 50% of its population since 1960, despite endless attempts by the city, state, feds, Big Three car makers, and more recently Rocket Mortgage to reverse this trend.
  • Second Wrong Point: The article attributes the current Urban Doom Loop to “the lingering effects of the pandemic.” While lockdowns in cities like LA and NYC disrupted city economic life with work-from-home leaving office buildings empty and few retail shoppers, this is not the only cause of the current Urban Dom Loop cycle. For many Midwestern and Eastern industrial cities, there are been several Urban Doom Loop cycles starting around 1950. This began with the shift of manufacturing first to suburbs, later to the South, and eventually developing countries.Returning WWII GIs took advantage of the GI Bill to buy starter homes in burgeoning suburbs aided by the Interstate system that facilitated commuting. Then, the wave of civil disturbances in 1967 and 1968 accelerated the urban-to-suburban migration, along with well-intentioned but misguided federal urban renewal policies. This might have been better termed “urban removal,” with thousands of commercial buildings and housing units bulldozed in the name of “slum and blight clearance.” The replacements were usually high-rise public housing like the infamous Cabrini Green Housing Project in Chicago and soulless windswept office plazas like the Empire State Plaza in Albany (Jane Jacobs prescient 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities is still relevant in understanding the implications of poor urban land planning). The planners either didn’t understand or didn’t care that the original residents would never return to the “decent safe and sanitary housing” (HUD lingo) or want to work in isolated office building “islands.”I grew up in the then Jewish immigrant trending African American Near Northside of Minneapolis, which was “blighted” but was actually a well-functioning urban neighborhood with plenty of inexpensive housing, shops, and a street-car line to downtown 10 minutes away. By 1960, the city had begun buying the properties for wholesale clearance, including our house. While my parents could have bought a house in a better part of the Northside, they bought a modest house further west to a working-class first-tier suburb. In his new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, Jack Cashill analyses this urban-to-suburban migration.
  • Correct Point: The article argues that “failing metropolitan centres need creative solutions from the public and private sectors.” The resurrection of most downtowns and commercial nodes like Times Square in NYC in the 1980s from decades of decline took a combination of public funds in the form of grants and other subsidies and pioneering developers willing to risk capital. Around 1980, a pioneer developer tackled Times Square. The developer used city tax abatements and a HUD Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) to renovate the dilapidated Commodore Hotel into the Grant Hyatt Hotel, just ahead of the 1980s economic boom. Cities can’t facilitate this kind of urban metamorphosis without private developers and developers won’t make risky investments without grants and subsidies. Like or it or not, this is how American cities come back from the dead, although it can take years or decades for this process to unfold.

Many American cities, large and small, are in some stage of the current Urban Doom Loop. This is due to a perfect storm including the COVID pandemic and work-from-home policies/lockdowns and an array of sudden and perhaps not well thought out public policy shifts like ending cash bail, reducing police budgets, allowing homeless encampments on streets and in parks, adopting the new Housing First approach to addressing homelessness instead of the traditional treatment first strategy, the flood of fentanyl and other drugs across the porous southern border, the tolerance of shoplifting and other crimes, and so on. Whatever the reasons one ascribes the current Urban Doom Loop to, it’s real. People, no matter how committed they are to urban living (I love big cities and am a fan of New Urbanism planning concepts), will flee unsafe and dirty streets, while businesses that become unprofitable will close or move, leaving vacancies.

In the face of the above, how will government policymakers and foundations respond? A typical response would be an avalanche of new federal, state, local, and foundation grants, not only for redevelopment and adaptive reuse of vacant office and retail buildings into affordable housing, but also for human services. As downtown economies falter, low-income and working-class residents will need more services at the same time as local tax revenues fall. We are currently in the Post-Covid Grant Wave with lots of funding for EVs, carbon reduction, advanced manufacturing, etc., but this won’t last because grant waves never do. We’ve seen this before and the Urban Doom Loop Grant Wave is approaching. Nimble nonprofits and local governments should be poised to take advantage of the new funding likely to emerge as the 2024 election approaches.

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Bad nonprofits: An unfortunate reality of charitable giving in America

I recently saw an article about “The WORST charities in America? These are the organizations giving over 90 PERCENT of donations to their fatcat executives – while ignoring their causes.” Anyone who’s worked with nonprofit organizations over time knows that, while most are reasonably honest and at least try to perform needed services, some aren’t.

Since 1993, we’re written grants for somewhere between 600 and 1,000 nonprofits across America. When a prospective nonprofit client calls for a fee quote, I can usually tell within a couple of minutes if the caller is a true believer (about 10%) or a more typical nonprofit. It’s much harder, however, to tell if the nonprofit is honorable, because nonprofit executives are skilled in the art of happy talk—a bit like Gríma Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings.

During initial calls, the prospective client is interviewing us, but to a degree we’re also interviewing them, since we try not to accept assignments from clients who are illegible applicants. Eligibility is almost always straightforward, but we also try to avoid scammers and scoundrels, which is much harder. A few times, callers have told us outright that they plan in effect to misuse the grant money.

Some of the red flags we look for:

  • The caller refers to their nonprofit as a “business” or “company,” or otherwise talk about their organizations as if they’re running a business that’s going to pay money out to its owners. Real nonprofit executives rarely use this sort of terminology, since nonprofits are not supposed to generate profit and there are no “shareholders” (excess revenue over expenses is usually termed “operating reserves” or “endowment”).
  • The Board of Directors has five or fewer members. While it’s possible to organize a 501(c)3 nonprofit will just a few Board members, they’re usually supposed to be “community-based,” so one expects to see a board of 7 – 11 members (odd numbers break tie votes). Tiny boards often enable the Executive Director to control the board by cherry picking compliant members. As we describe in the linked post, the Executive Director can run a nonprofit with this board structure like a small business without worrying about interference or a board coup.
  • The Executive Director admits that they own the nonprofit’s facility and lease it to the nonprofit. While not always technically illegal, this obviously raises self-dealing concerns.
  • The Executive Director brags about double or triple funders for the same client or service. For example, a substance abuse disorder (SUD) treatment provider might bill Medicaid and a specific grant or contract for the same service. This is a fairly common practice, but generally illegal and not discussed in polite company. Sometimes double-billing is the only way to provide effective services, but you’re not supposed to admit this to relative strangers.
  • The nonprofit is just straight up charging fees to its client for services rendered. I’m not talking about a Boys and Girls Club charging a modest, but waivable, fee to join a club basketball team, but rather something like a Board & Care home in effect stealing the client’s SSI payment and putting it towards “rent,” while providing little more that “three hots and a cot.” Some years ago, we had to terminate a retainer agreement with a nonprofit that was supposedly providing adoption counseling, but in reality was selling babies.

At least six Executive Directors of former S + A clients have gone to prison, usually federal, for various frauds and scams, though we only find this out when we happen to spot a news article or someone sends us the story, so the real number is likely higher. Let’s assume that under 1% of nonprofits are bad applies, but there are over 1.5 million American nonprofits, so even a 1% estimate results in tens of thousands of questionable nonprofits. Size isn’t necessarily an indication of honor, since our nonprofit clients range from mom & pop community groups to hospital chains with billions in annual revenue. The larger the organization, the greater the number of funders and potential for corruption. Why steal a small amount when you can steal a large amount?

While we attempt to identify potential scammers, it’s much harder to decide which nonprofits to donate one’s own money to. Some of my rules of thumb for personal philanthropy:

  • Don’t donate money to any organization that buys TV advertising.
  • Pick a type of charity that you’re familiar with. If you’ve had a relative struggling with addiction or homelessness, you’re likely already familiar with good local nonprofit providers.
  • Choose a charity with a local facility you can visit to meet the staff and possibly some of the clients. Mismatched office equipment or perfectly matched equipment doesn’t mean much, although if the equipment is super nice, ask how they got it. A scammer can fill their office with Goodwill rejects for show purposes, while a good nonprofit might have just received an in-kind donation from Steelcase of 20 new desks and chairs. If something doesn’t pass the smell test, ask.
  • Be wary of any organization that can “sell stuff out the back door.” This can range from re-selling donated computer gear that was supposed to go a after school program on eBay, or an animal rescue farm selling the occasional steer to McDonald’s.
  • If the donation is relatively large or your antenna has gone up, ask to see the nonprofit’s 990 Federal Tax Returns for the last few years, which among other things, should list salaries.
  • Consult Givewell.org
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Depressing NAEP math and reading assessments provide grant-writing opportunities for nimble nonprofits

Despite the media’s fascination with irrelevancies like the Kardashians and moment-by-moment interpersonal political drama, many outlets at least partially covered the disastrous recent National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Report on the 2022 4th and 8th Grade Math and Reading Assessments.* The Report says:

Between January and March 2022, the NAEP mathematics and reading assessments were administered to representative samples of United States fourth- and eighth-grade students. [. . . ] Student academic achievement during the COVID-19 pandemic is compared to pre-pandemic performance on the 2019 NAEP assessments as well as to previous assessments dating back to 1990.

In 2022, the Report finds (the next six bullets come from the Report):

Mathematics

  • The average fourth-grade mathematics score decreased by five points and was lower than all previous assessment years going back to 2005; the average score was one point higher compared to 2003.
  • The average eighth-grade mathematics score decreased by eight points compared to 2019 and was lower than all previous assessment years going back to 2003.
  • Fourth- and eighth-grade mathematics scores declined for most states/jurisdictions as well as for most participating urban districts compared to 2019.

Reading

  • The average reading score at both fourth and eighth grade decreased by three points compared to 2019.
  • At fourth grade, the average reading score was lower than all previous assessment years going back to 2005 and was not significantly different in comparison to 1992.
  • At eighth grade, the average reading score was lower compared to all previous assessment years going back to 1998 and was not significantly different compared to 1992.
  • Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores declined for most states/jurisdictions compared to 2019.

Take a few minutes to read these bullet points again. It’s widely recognized that, if a student can’t read at grade level in 3rd grade, the likelihood that they will not graduate from high school (and may become functionally illiterate adults) goes way up. America’s increasingly information-based economy demands workers with at least an understanding of high-school-level math. No one is going to become a coder without algebra skills. On the other hand, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows that many fast-growing jobs require few reading and math skills—some of those jobs being cooks, for example. And the fields with the most new jobs include “Home health and personal care aides” and ” Waiters and waitresses.” These sorts of jobs, however, usually don’t pay living wages (or barely pay them) and have very little career ladder potential.

Still, although the COVID-era learning losses are bad, they also imply opportunities for nonprofits interested in after-school and tutoring efforts. While there’s already lots of federal, state, local, and foundation funding for educational enrichment programming, there’ll likely be much grant funds for this purpose soon, as reality sinks in.

So, if your nonprofit works with at-risk youth** or wants to, the coming months will be a great time to seek funding for after school and/or tutoring programs. For example, the state of Arizona just announced a second year of funding for the OnTrack Summer Camp, which provides educational enrichment for over 70,000 school-age kids. The OnTrack Summer Camp website states: “With over $100 million from the American Rescue Plan Act ready to fund engaging Summer Camp experiences, school leaders, educators, and youth service providers like you can apply for AZ OnTrack funding so parents in your community have a trusted place to send their students for up to 8 weeks of educational opportunities.” Translated into English, this means Arizona nonprofits can apply for grants to provide these services.

These kind of RFP opportunities will be popping up all over America soon, not just Arizona. Some of the money will come from long-standing federal pass-through to states programs like 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC) Program and the Title I Supplemental Educational Services (SES) Program, while other funding will come from COVID-era programs like ARP. Expect some new programs, too. Make sure your agency gets on the mailing/email lists for your state department of education, municipality, and school district—and start knocking on community foundation doors. The last time there was a flood of money into educational support programs was during the Clinton era, and the early days of the George W. Bush Administrations, which overlap almost perfectly with the 30 year timeframe of educational stagnation highlighted by the NAEP report.


* The “media” is also a machine for responding to reader incentives, so if articles about banal interpersonal dramas do well, the media produces more of them. Look in the mirror, and see if that the enemy is there. This is also true of voting, by the way.

** The current politically correct phrase for “at-risk youth” is now “opportunity youth,” if you like that euphemism better.

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Denver and Barcelona: A tale of two cities and the apparent decline of America’s downtowns

I’m writing this post at 39K feet over the Atlantic on my way home from eight days in Barcelona; Barcelona contrasts sharply with most American cities. For example, about one year ago I spent five days in downtown Denver, and, for one who’s worked on redevelopment and urban development in a variety of capacities for decades, the differences between Barcelona and Denver (or many cities like Denver) is depressing. The Barcelona city centre—as downtowns are called across the Pond—is alive and vibrant, while downtown Denver feels like it’s dying. Among other factors, many American cities are stuck in neutral due to parking minimums and an inability to build mass transit largely because of the Orwellianly named National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA).

Continue reading Denver and Barcelona: A tale of two cities and the apparent decline of America’s downtowns

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Congress passes gun reform bill: News for nimble nonprofits and public agencies

Our usually dyspeptic Congress recently passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act AKA Gun Reform Bill, which has funding for new discretionary grant programs in it. Since the advent of COVID in 2020, Congress has passed a series of trillion dollar-plus spending bills containing many grant opportunities for nonprofits, public agencies, and businesses involved in stuff like electric vehicle batteries, geothermal energy, solar panel research and construction, and much more. We know, as S + A has been at, near, or over full capacity for most of the past 2.5 years; we thought this flood would slow, as it did in 2010 following the 2009 Stimulus Bill. But we were wrong, which is great news for us grant writers—and for nonprofits and public agencies.

In addition to a raft of reforms aimed at (pun intended) rising gun violence, the 80-page Gun Reform Bill has $750M to “incentivize” states to pass Red Flag laws. Translated from Washington-speak, this likely means big formula grants to the states, which will in turn likely pass through much of their federal funding into RFPs for local agencies to “do something.” The “something” won’t be all that important, as the goal will be to get the money to the streets. The Bill also allocates billions to schools and communities (this means CBOs, or community-based organizations) to expand mental health programs. These new funding rivers—they’re too big to be mere “streams”—will likely flow through the Department of Education, SAMHSA, HRSA, OJJDP, HUD, etc., in the form of RFPs over the next few years.

Other grant ornaments will emerge from the Gun Reform Bill, proposed Climate Emergency executive actions, and additional legislation this and next year that addresses emerging problems. The feds like to throw money at problems, call the money “important action,” and see what sticks. Around the time of the Columbine shooting in 1999, President Clinton and Congress ramped up funding for odd things like “Midnight Basketball,” as well as one of our favorites, the 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC) program, and many other programs that were supposed to improve school mental health services, mentoring, and provide safe after school hours activities. Since then, we’ve seen the Sandy Hook school massacre, the Uvalde school massacre, and many others. But we’re doing something. In the first decade of the 21st Century, we wrote at least 50 funded 21st CCLC and similar grants.

The FY ’23 federal budget year begins October 1, and smart local agencies will start planning now to get their piece of the mental health and related grant pies. Even if your agency has little behavioral health experience, this is the time to develop some and form partnerships to make your grants applications more believable than they might be otherwise.

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Substance Abuse Disorder/Opioid Use Disorder (SUD/OUD): Traditional treatment versus harm reduction for grant writers

We’ve been writing Substance Use Disorder / Opioid Use Disorder (SUD/OUD) treatment grant proposals since 1993, so we’ve been at it for long enough to see waves of funder preferences around approaches come and go. SUD/OUD are hard problems, and made harder because of the misinformation and disinformation about Oxycodone and Oxycontin that Purdue Pharma and its subsidiaries spread for decades, in a way that’s likely worse than the way the cigarette companies once marketed their wares.

For the first 20 years or so in business, the SUD/OUD treatment grant proposals we wrote were usually based on the standard “Step-Down” paradigm, in which people with addiction receive treatment along a continuum of care from a high level of care and then “step down” to lower care levels in increments, leading to eventual recovery and self-care. Following engagement, referral, or self-presentation and development of an individual treatment plan (ITP), the step-down levels are more or less like this:

  • Detoxification/hospitalization
  • Inpatient treatment
  • Intensive outpatient treatment
  • Outpatient treatment, often including 12-Step peer support groups and, for those with OUD, medication assisted treatment (MAT)
  • Recovery and self-care

The levels can be further broken down, but the above is a common schema. As patients move down the treatment continuum, they usually receive case-managed wraparound supportive services—like legal assistance, workforce development, primary/dental care, affordable housing, etc.— at least until they are in recovery and have been “clean and sober” for six to twelve months. The “affordable housing” part has gotten much harder, though, because most cities use zoning laws to restrict the supply of housing, which causes prices to rise, which makes a given housing unit difficult for a grant-funded organization, or a person with drug addiction, to afford. Also, it’s an unfortunate reality that most people with SUD/OUD will relapse multiple times, sending them to the top of the treatment pyramid again. In this way, step-down treatment is something like the classic board game Chutes and Ladders I played as a kid. “Step down” was the main “treatment game” available for decades, although methadone was sometimes used for what we now call OUD.

About ten years ago, we began noticing a difference in SAMSHA, HRSA, and other RFPs for SUD/OUD: those agencies now want usually applicants to augment treatment to include “harm reduction.” As defined and described by SAMHSA, “Harm reduction is critical to keeping people who use drugs alive and as healthy as possible, and is a key pillar in the multi-faceted Health and Human Services’ Overdose Prevention Strategy.” Most of our clients resisted this shift but have gradually gotten on board the harm reduction train as pure harm reduction RFPs, like SAMHSA’s “FY ’22 Harm Reduction NOFO,” began to appear. The shift isn’t surprising, because in grant seeking it pays to follow the golden rule. No, not that golden rule, this one: “The people with the gold make the rules.”

Harm reduction projects usually involve a van-based outreach model in which Peer Support Workers (PSWs) go in teams to what are termed “hot spots” to engage people living with SUD/OUD. “Hot spots” include places like homeless encampments, shelters, parks, etc. The outreach effort can be either obvious (e.g., signage on the van and PSWs in logo t-shirts) or on the down low (e.g., plain white van and PSWs in street clothes), or a hybrid version using magnetic signs placed on the van, or removed from it, depending on the needs of a particular location on a given day. The PSWs distribute harm reduction supplies like clean syringes (with or without exchange), alcohol swabs, sterile water ampules, spoons, fentanyl test strips, sharps containers, and condoms, along with emergency food, clothing, hygiene items, and so forth. The outreach van is also used to provide some direct services in the field like wound care, rapid HIV tests, and naloxone administration.

The most extreme version of harm reduction are safe injection sites: while these are illegal in most of America because the drugs themselves are technically illegal, if widely available, three safe injection sites have recently and prominently opened, two in NYC and one in San Francisco. One key problem with a safe injection site initiative is that few businesses or residents want one near them, much like no one wants to be in proximity of a methadone clinic, so permitting is a real challenge. We’ve yet to write a safe injection site proposal but likely soon will.

A key difference between the standard treatment model and the harm reduction model is that clients are typically not tracked (when Joe or Mary shows up for supplies, their identity isn’t verified and they aren’t entered into a client database for tracking), and, most significantly, services aren’t case-managed. PSWs will offer “warm handoffs” for follow-up treatment like MAT and other center-based services, but there’s no automated follow-up from the harm reduction team.

We’re just grant writers, so we don’t have an immediate opinion as to whether step-down treatment or harm reduction is more efficacious, and most studies on the subject are somewhat questionable, although every treatment/harm reduction proposal we write claims the project design uses “evidence-based practices” (EBPs). When in doubt, claim both “evidence” and “innovation” for your program, leaving aside that those two are often mutually exclusive. If your agency provides SUD/OUD treatment, consider adding a harm reduction component, as this is clearly where the feds are going with grant funds. A cynic might conclude that the feds are pushing harm reduction because it’s much cheaper than providing longitudinal case-managed treatment, but we’ll leave that conclusion to others.

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How to prepare a DOT “Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity” (RAISE) application

NOTE: This “how to” post is a companion to “The Dept. of Transportation (DOT) issues first RFP under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law: Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE). You should probably read that post first, which was posted yesterday.

The recently passed Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) has $1T (yes, that’s a “trillion”) for a cornucopia of funding from DOT, DOE, and other Federal agencies. BIL authorizes grants for an array of infrastructure projects, including lead water pipe replacement, high-speed internet, transportation and public transit, airports, passenger rail, electric-vehicle charging stations, electric utility infrastructure, environmental remediation, and the development of time machines (okay, I made up the last entry to see if you’re paying attention).

DOT just issued the first RFP under the new BIL (see note and link above), and a flood of other infrastructure RFPs will be published in the coming months: do as much as can be reasonably be completed in advance, even though you won’t know the specific requirements until the RFP is available. Follow these action steps and you’ll be ready to submit technically correct applications without organizational hysteria as the deadline approaches:

  • Designate a project manager or, as Apple and other tech companies refer to this person, the “Directly Responsible Individual” (DRI).
  • Most funding under the BIL will be for planning and/or development of some sort of physical improvement, structure, or facility. This kind of proposal is very different than a typical human services or R & D proposal: the narrative sections are usually relatively short and often are not composed of a single narrative, but rather are disjointed responses to highly specific questions scattered throughout the RFP; these small narratives may have to be included in different sections of the final application. Severe word or character counts restrictions will likely apply for each narrative section, making it harder to tell a coherent “narrative story” about the project and engage the imagination of the readers who will score the proposal. There should be a section for an abstract or project summary, which may be the grant writer’s only opportunity to draft a topic paragraph that answers the six essential questions that every proposal must include: Who, What Where, When, Why, and How (the 5 Ws and H). If there’s no abstract or project summary, find a place somewhere to include this topic paragraph. The final application, when printed out by the funder*, will look like a layer cake with the narratives interspersed with a myriad of forms, drawings, and exhibits that can easily run to over 200 pages. It is crucial that the RFP application instructions be closely followed, as no matter how great the project concept or the political juice behind it are, the application will not be scored and will be tossed if it’s deemed technically deficient. In most cases, you will not have an opportunity to correct deficiencies.
  • Make sure that your agency can demonstrate site control in the form of a title, right-of-way easement, lease or lease-option. If leased, the term of the lease must be longer than the useful life of the proposed capital improvement(s).
  • Hire an architectural and/or engineering firm to conduct design studies and eventually working drawings needed to obtain a building permit. Due to concerns over climate change and sustainability, select an architect/engineer who will design to meet high-level LEED “green building” standards.
  • Have the architect/engineer develop a master timeline to take the project from concept to moving dirt and establish the critical path for project completion. Once the timeline is set, the DRI should convene the first of a series of “all hands” meetings involving key internal and external stakeholders (e.g., utility company representatives, fire department, etc.). As the project moves forward, keep your eye on the critical path and adjust the timeline frequently. The DRI must keep the project moving forward.
  • Make sure that the architect/engineer interfaces with the jurisdiction’s planning department and/or building department to understand the land use and zoning constraints on the site, as well as the level of environmental review that will be needed. Determine required hearings and discretionary permits/approvals and the anticipated timing of getting the permits/approvals (add these to the project timeline). Depending on the project concept, county, state, and/or federal permits/approvals may be necessary (e.g., EPA, State Office of Historic Preservation “SHPO”, etc.)
  • Have the architect/engineer prepare a conceptual site plan for agency review and, eventually, a second trip the planning/building departments for a reality check. The DRI should schedule any necessary pre-building permit public hearings. The public hearings will need to be formally noticed and widely advertised–these hearings will be where cranky, angry local NIMBYs will show up to complain. No matter how altruistic the project seems, assume that there will be organized opposition and develop a plan to co-opt the opposition or at least address their concerns. We’ve constructed a legal world in which building anything, anywhere, is dragged down by this process, to the detriment of all of us, but Seliger + Associates doesn’t make the rules, we just write the proposals.
  • If feasible, given the project timeline and anticipated RFP release, have the architect/engineer prepare detailed working drawings, based on the conceptual plan (as revised) and apply for a building permit. While not always possible, the best way to demonstrate project feasibility to a funder is having obtained a building permit. This makes it possible to use the ever popular “but for” argument in your proposal: “but for only the grant, the project can be immediately implemented.” This argument is a variation on President Obama’s “shovel ready projects” argument when the 2009 Stimulus Bill was passed.

If all of the above steps are completed, you still won’t have a shovel-ready project; instead, you’ll have an “on the shelf” project and will vastly increase the likelihood of a positive funding decision, as funders for these kind of projects prefer applications that look like they can be quickly started. No funder wants to approve a grant for a project that can’t be built expeditiously—or built at all.

Generally, with an on-the-shelf project, the only step needed after the grant is awarded is to conduct a public-bid process to select the general contractor. A complete application without gotchas and fumbling is the way to soften the stone-like hearts of funder decision makers as they imagine attending the ground breaking ceremony with President Biden and, ideally, Kim Kardashian on hand.

 


* While Seliger + Associates and our readers live in the digital world of 2022, for many federal agencies it’s still 1997. Although most federal proposals are digital uploads, in many cases the proposals are printed out for review and scoring. Thus, all attachments should be 8 1/2″ x 11″ and reviewers will likely view the proposal in grey-scale print outs, not on the 27″ iMacs and 24″ Dell side monitors we use, so beautiful color graphics may be wasted.