Posted on Leave a comment

Grant writers and the USDA’s “Rural Energy for America Program” (REAP)

The Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) “Rural Energy for America Program” (REAP) is unusual because of the size of the program (which grant writers will note): it has $1 billion dollars available for up to 9,000 grants—but with an award ceiling of just one million. One million? That’s for grants only, however, and loan guarantees go much higher. In other words, a lot of organizations are going to apply for REAP funding and and many will be funded. Still, the “Rural Energy for America Program” (REAP) is doling funding out over six quarters, rather than all at once. I’m not wholly sure why USDA chose this structure, but it seemingly has. There’s no formal deadline, because the Dept. of Agriculture will accept REAP applications throughout the year, but that can leave applicants in the dangerous position of deciding that they’ll do their application “next month” forever. The “we’ll do it next month” thing is one of the essential challenges with open application of the “first come, first served” variety. Applicants who see a Notice of Funding Opportunity (“NOFO,” which is USDA-speak for RFP) like this can face a dilemma: if you apply early, the project concept may not be “cooked,” but if you wait too long, the funding pool may become exhausted.

If you’re thinking about applying to the “Rural Energy for America Program” (REAP), call us at 800.540.8906 ext. 1, or contact us: we’re grant writers, and it’s our job to help make your USDA REAP proposal preparation process simple. Few small businesses or agricultural producers are familiar with the grant-seeking and grant-making processes, but we sure are, and we’ve worked on a variety of USDA clean energy and rural-focused projects. One favorite recent project in the agricultural-services sector involved a hog-processing plant in the Midwest; our client knew a huge amount about slaughtering hogs and selling ham but nothing about grants. We learned a lot about hogs, and our client learned a bit about grants, as we helped them submit a technically correct and compelling proposal with a minimum of fuss and bother on their part. To stretch the hog analogy a bit, Seliger + Associates is the fully cooked ham of grant writers: just heat ‘n serve—or, I should say, just hire ‘n submit.

In terms of REAP, one slight downside to the program is cost sharing: applicants need to contribute at least half of the total project budget. As we’ve written about before, however, matching funds for grants are often not all that hard to find. The actual eligible REAP activities are variable: they include doing “energy audits” (which is a classic “process” activity that is close to free or “walkin’ around” money), but also the installation of actual energy improvements and energy efficiency systems. That last one is probably where the bulk of the money is.

Eligible applicants must be either “agricultural producers” or, alternatively, “rural small businesses.” The relevant federal regs at “§ 4280.112 Applicant eligibility” also cite site control as being important. So REAP is a very specific and very targeted funding program (wise grant writers check eligibility requirements carefully), but a lot of farms, other agricultural producers, and rural small businesses are looking into solar, batteries, and related systems anyway. Geothermal is probably not quite at the stage where smaller organizations can deploy it, and ditto for wind, so I’d guess solar is likely to be the main beneficiary of REAP right now.

Another peculiarity of the USDA’s “Rural Energy for America Program” (REAP) program is that applicants need to get the application package itself “by contacting the RD Energy Coordinator” for the applicant’s home state. That’s an unusual choice; normal federal grant applications make the application package readily available on grants.gov or elsewhere. Still, with $25 million maximum loan guarantees and $1 million maximum grant requests, dealing with unusual structures will be worthwhile for many applicants.

Posted on Leave a comment

Grant writers for the ACF’s “Runaway and Homeless Youth – Prevention Demonstration Program” (RHY-PDP)

The FY 2023 “Runaway and Homeless Youth – Prevention Demonstration Program” (RHY-PDP) has several notable elements that should interest grant writers as well as potential nonprofit applicants: $2 million is available for ten grants of up to $200,000 annually for some number of years. The FY ’23 “Runaway and Homeless Youth – Prevention Demonstration Program” (RHY-PDP) application was due in June 20, but, if you’re thinking of applying in the future, now is the time to act.

Does your organization have a plan for getting the “Runaway and Homeless Youth – Prevention Demonstration Program” (RHY-PDP) application done? Let’s talk: call us at 800.540.8906 ext. 1, or email us at seliger@seliger.com, to get a fast, free fee quote to write your RHY-PDP proposal or edit your draft for a reasonable flat fee. Grant writers with long-term, proven track records are useful, valuable resources for any organization looking to submit a complete and technically correct RHY-PDP application.

The RHY-PDP program offers funding that will help precariously housed runaway and homeless youth find and maintain long-term housing solutions, while assisting those recently homeless with finding long-term and stable housing. Like many coordination programs, RHY-PDP appears not to offer much funding for the direct provision of housing—in other words, it doesn’t appear to offer funding for the most-needed services—but it still offers useful money for organizations looking to bolster their overall homelessness services portfolio. Many organizations will quietly reassign staff persons to different grants depending on which grants the organization has at a given time. RHY-PDP can be part of that effort. There are only 10 grants available: that may dissuade some nonprofits from competing, but it shouldn’t, because all of the usual suspects may also be dissuaded. Victory goes to those who try.

Continue reading Grant writers for the ACF’s “Runaway and Homeless Youth – Prevention Demonstration Program” (RHY-PDP)

Posted on Leave a comment

Curious instructions in the DOL’s “Nursing Expansion Grant Program” FOA

The Department of Labor’s (DOL) “Nursing Expansion Grant Program” funding Opportunity Announcement (or “FOA,” which is DOL-speak for “RFP”) has a peculiar instruction, which we, as grant writers, noticed right away: “NOTE: Full points will not be given for simply repeating the requirements stated below or elsewhere in the Announcement.” This is a humorous instruction because many FOAs tell applicants what to do, and the applicant’s main duty is to tell the funder that the applicant will in fact do whatever it is that the funder wants the applicant to do, and which the funder has specified already. “We are going to tell you what to do and how to do it,” the funder seems to be saying, “but we want you to tell us what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it.” The DOL, for the “Nursing Expansion Grant Program” application, says:

For example, if the applicant is asked, “Describe in detail how strategies to expand diversity, equity, inclusion and access to recruit participants will be implemented,” applications will not score the full points (and zero points may be received) for simply stating, “We will implement strategies to expand diversity, equity, inclusion, and access in our participant recruitment.” To receive full points, the applicant must describe, in their own words, the process or procedures their institution will use and what evidence is available to show those processes are effective for meeting the stated requirement.

The word “diversity” occurs 12 times in the “Nursing Expansion Grant Program” FOA, so there are a lot of places where applicants can pick up some diversity lingo for their applications. And, to the DOL’s credit, the strategies to be used “to expand diversity, equity, inclusion, and access in our participant recruitment” are pretty standard for an experienced grant writer: hire diversity consultants; provide diversity training; favor candidates from particular demographic groups in employment, while simultaneously complying with laws that forbid discrimination; subject all recruitment materials to review by diversity consultants who are experts in all facets of diversity and the implementation of diversity; and so on. Are diversity consultants particularly qualified to judge the success or failure of diversity efforts? Maybe. Does hiring diversity consultants improve actual, real-world diversity on the ground? Maybe, maybe not. But the DOL wants diversity and therefore applicants are obliged to promise that they’ll focus on diversity, albeit without appearing to quote the DOL’s instructions that describe what the DOL wants.

The FOA questions have the air of an Inquisitor during the Inquisition: “We are asking the question, and we know the answer, but you must supply the answer we are looking for.” If the DOL knows the answer, why not just tell the applicant what the specific expectations are?

I don’t want to pick on diversity too much here, because the DOL also offers instructions like “Clearly identify the training strategy(ies) that will be deployed to train participants enrolled in the Nurse Education Professional Track or the Nursing Career Pathways Track, as described in Section I.E. Program Design and Allowable Activities,” as if humans don’t have millennia of experience in “training strategies,” almost all of which reduce to some combination of direct instruction and hands-on practice. How do you ascertain someone’s blood pressure? We’re going to show you how, then you’re going to do it, then we’re going to give you feedback, then you’re going to teach someone else to do it.

Who knows: maybe some applicant to the “Nursing Expansion Grant Program” will reinvent the entirety of human education and knowledge transmission, but I’d personally bet against that, and I’m guessing that the same strategies will be used that anyone who’s ever participated in K – 16 education will be familiar with. There’re only so many ways to slice a salami and all that.

Some applicants could use online modules as part of their education effort (someone is probably vending those for nursing education), and those online modules might be appropriate for highly motivated trainees, but we’ve seen through the course of the COVID-19 pandemic that, in most cases, online modules don’t effectively replace in-person learning for most people.

I’m (obviously) a grant writer, but I also occasionally teach writing and related subjects for undergraduate college students and have seen the results of online “education” firsthand. Non-traditional nursing students may be more motivated than typical undergrad cohorts, but much of nursing is a hands-on discipline that needs in-person training, and thus it’s not likely to be highly efficacious online—and that’s particularly true given online education’s existing drawbacks.

Continue reading Curious instructions in the DOL’s “Nursing Expansion Grant Program” FOA

Posted on Leave a comment

Job training and workforce development funding is sometimes found in strange places

We keep an eye on as many parts of the federal grant-making system as we can,* which sometimes reveals peculiarities—the latest being from the Department of Energy (DOE), in its “Bipartisan Infrastructure Law: Advancing Equity through Workforce Partnerships” Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA). Normally, one would expect job training and workforce development funding to be run through the Department of Labor (DOL), which says that its purpose is “To foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States [. . . and] advance opportunities for profitable employment.” The DOE, however, is now getting into the business of advancing “opportunities for profitable employment.” This makes this job-training funding opportunity easy for the unwary to miss, since a good funding opportunity for job training and workforce development is being stashed in a federal agency that’s normally devoted to energy research, development, and implementation.

Look closely at the Advancing Equity FOA and you’ll see evidence of a funding entity set up to fund research, not job training. For example, you’ll find that “Applicants must submit a Letter of Intent and a Concept Paper by 5:00pm ET” by September 13, 2022. I’ve been in this business for decades and can’t recall seeing a Concept Paper required for a job-training grant, because job training grants don’t require novel research (neither can Isaac). “Research” is, by definition, uncertain as to whether it’ll succeed; if we already know something is going to succeed, or likely to succeed, we’d call it “implementation.”

Continue reading Job training and workforce development funding is sometimes found in strange places

Posted on 5 Comments

Housing the homeless: the “traditional approach” versus “housing first” for grant writers

We’ve been writing grant proposals for housing and supportive services for people experiencing homelessness (this is the PC phrase, but “homeless” is used in the rest of this post) since 1993, so we’ve been at it for long enough to see changing funder and client preferences around approaches come and go. For many reasons that are beyond the scope of this post, homelessness remains a growing and in some respects an intractable challenge in much of urban and rural America; essentially, homelessness is a housing shortage problem. Until we address housing abundance, we’re not going to be able to solve or substantially ameliorate homelessness as a problem.

Recently, we wrote a post on the emerging trend toward harm reduction instead of traditional SUD/OUD treatment. A similar phenomenon is going on with respect to providing housing and supportive services for homeless folks. This is the concept of “Housing First:”

Housing First is a homeless assistance approach that prioritizes providing permanent housing to people experiencing homelessness, thus ending their homelessness and serving as a platform from which they can pursue personal goals and improve their quality of life. This approach is guided by the belief that people need basic necessities like food and a place to live before attending to anything less critical, such as getting a job, budgeting properly, or attending to substance use issues.

At first glance, Housing First looks like a reasonable and compassionate approach. In the 1980s, when homelessness as an issue entered public discourse, the sentiment was that Mary and her two kids live in their car because she got laid off from the Piggly Wiggly and was evicted from her apartment. While there are many people who find themselves in this sort of predicament, the majority of homeless have SUD/OUD and, in many cases, are co-diagnosed with serious and persistent mental illness (SPMI). But homelessness is easier to avoid, even for people with SUD, OUD, and/or SPMI, when rents are low. That’s why “it’s not the case that homelessness is high where vacancy rates are high. Indeed, it’s the opposite — the vacancy rate is lower in places with more homelessness.”

Housing for the homeless initiatives have traditionally focussed on a step-down approach similar to that which we described in the post on OUD/SUD treatment versus harm reduction. In the traditional paradigm, homeless people receive housing and other services along a continuum of care starting with a high level of care, and then they “step down” to lower care levels in increments, leading to eventual independent living. Following engagement, referral, or self-presentation and development of an individual housing assistance plan (“IHTP”), the step-down levels often proceed something like:

  • Detoxification/stabilization (if needed)
  • Shelter bed in an emergency shelter (usually limited to 30 to 60 days). Significantly, most shelters are “dry,” meaning that drinking and drugging aren’t allowed in the facility. Still, after breakfast, most people living in shelters spend their days out of the shelter on the street, with the idea that they’ll look for a job, attend treatment sessions, etc., and return at night to sleep. While this is more or less “two hots and a cot,” treatment and other supportive services are sometimes provided in-house and/or by referral.
  • Placement in a single room occupancy (SRO) hotel, transitional housing, or supportive housing unit with in-house and referral supportive services (e.g. SUD/OUD and SPMI treatment, legal assistance, workforce development, primary/dental care, etc.) usually provided in the latter two. In supportive housing, such services are usually case-managed and these facilities are usually dry. While there is typically no length of residency cap for SRO units, there is usually a 12 to 24 month max for transitional and supportive housing facilities. Unfortunately, SROs are largely illegal under the modern zoning regime, which may forces many precariously housed people on the street.
  • Independent living, usually with a Housing Choice Voucher (formerly called Section 8) or in another subsidized housing development, or with family.

The levels can be broken down further, but the above was the common approach and was formalized in the 1987 passage of the McKinney–Vento Homeless Assistance Act (McKinney-Vento), administered by HUD. The problem is, though, is that even if a person gets clean and sober, if he or she can’t afford rent, that person is likely to end up back on the street—and thus in high-stress, difficult situations that encourages coping via substance abuse. Covering $700/month in rent is much easier for a person with mental illness and substance abuse challenges than $2,000 a month.

Although McKinney-Vento funds 15 programs with a spectrum of services, the most significant ones are Supportive Housing, Shelter Plus Care (provides site-specific HCVs for the housing development and on-site services), SRO, and Emergency Shelter. One of the first large funded grants S + A wrote was a $4M Shelter Plus Care proposal for a nonprofit in Northern California to convert a vacant motel into a supportive housing facility in 1994. Over the years, McKinney-Vento has disappeared from public view, as these programs have been folded into HUD’s very confusing Continuum of Care (CoC) system. McKinney-Vento programs still form the structure for most federal efforts to help the homeless, but applications are made to the local CoC agency, not directly to HUD—which means local politics come into play, along with typical quiet deals cut among local players. Good luck breaking into CoC funding without an “in.” Well-meaning people in a given community often want to find something to do to help with the issue of homelessness, and they try to find sustainable for it, only to run into the local power structure.

For our first 20 years, most of the proposals we wrote for homeless housing and supportive services followed the above model: the emphasis was always on working with the homeless people to get them clean and sober, with SPMI under control, before moving from a shelter to longer term housing. About 10 years ago, we began to work with clients who wanted to use the Housing First approach: in this approach, underlying SUD/OUD and SPMI challenges are addressed, to an extent, but the overall goal is to provide fast housing—hence the term “Housing First.” This paradigm treats housing as the first step for life improvement and enables access to housing without conditions beyond those of a typical renter. Although supportive services are usually offered, participation is not required. This means the formerly homeless can continue to drink and drug and/or not comply with the SPMI treatment protocols. Utah was the first major state proponent of this approach, in part because Utah allows housing to be built relatively easily, but even Utah has run into problems.

This shift to the Housing Fist model has created something of a battle between the traditional homeless services providers like the faith-based “missions” that are found in most major cities, and the new Housing First kids on the block. This battle is being played out on social media and, most importantly, in public hearings and applications for CoC and other grants. Like any local structured grant system, such as CoC, Ryan White grants for people living with HIV/A, or Title 10 family planning, a “mafia” soon emerges. The mafia is composed of the existing agencies being funded, advocacy groups, and local politicians who have an interest in making sure favored nonprofits get funded. The mafia structure makes it harder for new, innovative agencies to secure a spot at the grant feeding trough. We’ve heard from some of our clients that the Housing First crowd has taken over CoC processes to the detriment of traditional providers. Housing First is clearly the church of what’s happening now.

We’re just grant writers, so we don’t have an immediate opinion as to whether the traditional approach or Housing First is more efficacious, though neither is likely to be highly effective without land-use reform that increases the total number of housing units. Without an abundance agenda, we’re merely reallocating slices of the pie, rather than increasing the pie’s size. Extensive homelessness is a symptom of deeper problems, and it can’t be effectively addressed without dealing with the root cause. Most studies on the subject of “traditional” and “Housing First” are somewhat questionable. While I’ve been in many shelters and other homeless housing settings over the years, I’ve never been in a Housing First facility, but I imagine that things might get a bit out of control come Saturday night. I also don’t know how housekeeping is handled. Also, most people with SUD/OUD and/or SPMI will relapse multiple times, which may send them back to the streets, jail, or residential treatment/hospitalization, meaning that their Housing First unit is actually their Housing Last unit.

Posted on Leave a comment

How many troubled Head Start programs are out there? Looking at ACF’s re-bid practices

Diligent grants.gov readers will occasionally see a bunch of notices for individual service areas for the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Administration for Children and Families (ACF) Head Start Program. Recently, for example, a dozen Head Start RFPs were issued, for places like “Kent and Sussex Counties, Delaware” or “Bates, Cass, Cedar, Henry, St. Clair and Vernon Counties, Missouri.” I did some research on grantees in those areas and found that many Head Start programs in them had been taken over by something called the “Community Development Institute” (CDI) Head Start, which appears to be an ACF multi-area Head Start grantee whose job is to take over the miscreant Head Start programs and operate them until a new local operator can be found, wrangled, tackled, press-ganged, etc. To understand what’s going on, it’s necessary consider the long history of Head Start and its kin, Early Head Start.

Head Start, one of the original “War on Poverty” programs, has been around since 1965; ACF says over 1 million children are enrolled in Head Start annually, and there are Head Start programs in most parts of inhabited America—urban, suburban and rural. Many Head Start programs are operated by the 1,000 or so Community Action Agencies (CAAs), another 1965 War on Poverty relic, funded through the DHHS Office of Community Services (OCS).

Head Start grantees, like HRSA-funded Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), aren’t guaranteed funding and must periodically compete in new RFPs processes. But not every area has a competent grantee in it—particularly in sparsely populated rural areas or extremely poor areas, where services are often most needed. We’ve worked on numerous projects for organizations that are working through various permutations of this problem, our favorite being a SAC applicant who forgot to apply for their Section 330 grant when their Service Area Competition (SAC) NOFO was open, causing the applicant’s HRSA program officer to call, after the deadline, to say, “Where is your application?” HRSA allowed a late application, which is unusual, and we were able to write their SAC proposal in less than a week. These aren’t ideal or recommended conditions, however.

Searching local news in many of the counties listed by ACF as needing new Head Start grantees yields articles about whatever is going on at these troubled Head Start grantees, but those local news articles lack detail. Still, the regularity with which ACF issue these service area level RFPs shows the challenges not just of getting a Head Start grant, but of running the program successfully. Overall, Head Start is one of the few federal grant-funded programs that shows up regularly in popular media in heartwarming feature stories about low-income kids learning in a nurturing environment—and that sometimes happens. Head Start has also been the subject of much research, which increases its visibility. The research has generated much debate about Head Start’s efficacy at improving educational outcomes for at-risk kids; given its long history, the grandparents or great grandparents of kids in Head Start today were also very likely were in Head Start. Intergenerational Head Start enrollment doesn’t necessarily argue for the program’s real impact, but we’ll leave discussions of “impact” for another post.

Head Start is as much a jobs program as it is an early childhood education program. Head Start grants fund tens of thousands of jobs for low-income folks to work as non-credentialed or lightly credentialed “teachers.” These jobs have traditionally been filled mostly by single moms, whose kids are usually enrolled in Head Start. Thus, the local Head Start programs meet two critical needs in low-income communities—heavily subsidized early childhood education (or “child care” for the cynics) and reliable, easy-entry jobs with some career-ladder potential. Thus, when a Head Start program goes under, it can be a real crisis in low-income and especially low-income rural areas, which is probably why ACF tries to use the Community Development Institute and similar outfits to plug gaps. If any readers have a good story to tell about recycling of Head Start grants, write a guest post and we’ll post it anonymously.

Need your Head Start, or any other proposal, written? Call us at 800.540.8906 ext. 2, or send an email to seliger@seliger.com.

Posted on Leave a comment

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.

Posted on Leave a comment

Deciding on the grant proposal structure: ACF’s recent Early Head Start (EHS) application illustrates the challenge

Many RFPs don’t simply and directly state, “Use the following header pattern in your response to the narrative questions.” Why don’t funders tell applicants which header pattern to use? Bureaucracy, legal requirements, funder indifference, signaling: whatever the reason(s), we’ve run into a bunch of program RFPs recently that don’t explicitly state what headers should be used (like the Small Business Innovation and Research grants (SBIRs) we wrote about last week). In structuring responses to confusing RFPs, there are two main schools of thought: one is to use the general headers found in the RFP, and then reply to all the sub-questions in paragraph form. The other school of thought is to use the general headers and every sub-header found either the narrative instructions (if there are any) or the review instructions (if there are any of those). Neither approach is necessarily “right.”

The recent ACF Early Head Start (EHS) RFP, for which we just wrote a proposal, offers a good example of this challenge. Like SBIRs, the EHS RFP has, bafflingly, two sets of narrative instructions: on Adobe page 35, under “Approach” and the other on Adobe page 57, under “Application Review Criteria.” Neither is quite canonical—in other words, the instructions don’t say, in big bold type, “USE THIS HEADER SET.” Instead, ACF offers maddening ambiguity. Perhaps this maddening ambiguity is deliberate, but is more likely due to this fact: the folks who write the RFPs never write the proposals in response and, as bureaucrats, likely they simply don’t care.

Regardless, one has to decide whether it’s better to use just top-level outlines, like “1. Community Need and Objectives, 2. Program Design and Approach,” or sub-header outlines, like “1. Community Need and Objectives, a. the proposed service area and location(s) where services will be delivered.” We chose to mostly follow page 57, while still referencing material on page 35. As with SBIRs, though, there is no 100% right answer, because neither the NIH or ACF give applicants one—but both could reject applications that don’t follow the weakly specified instructions.

Posted on Leave a comment

HUD’s Lead Hazard Reduction grant program and the hazards of government autopilot

The NOFA for HUD’s Lead Hazard Reduction (LHR) grant program just came out, and it has $275 million to undertake, as usual, “comprehensive programs to identify and control lead-based paint hazards in eligible privately-owned target housing.” LHR NOFAs are issued every year or two, which is fine, but those of you who are alive and able to read or access the Internet are probably aware that there’s another health hazard out there this year, and it’s a health hazard that’s probably more urgent than lead-based paint—lead-based paint has been illegal in the US since 1980 and HUD’s been funding LHR grants for at least 30 years (we know, because we’ve written so many funded LHR proposals). It’s hard to believe that there’re all that many housing units left in the US with lead-based paint, but HUD soldiers on.

Sure, lead is a health hazard, but COVID-19 is also a health hazard; if I had to bet which one most persons would consider more hazardous right now, I’d bet on COVID-19. $275 million may be a small amount of money by federal standards, but I wonder how much the staff at HUD thought about whether public housing authorities (PHAs) and cities want to work on lead abatement this year, versus how much they’d like and need to work on COVID-19 abatement; $275 million can buy a lot of masks, education, and tests (although tests are still in short supply right now). It’s not really the fault of HUD bureaucrats, since LHR grants have been authorized by Congress for for decades and Congress usually just keeps funding programs like this, no matter what’s going on in the real world. Nonetheless, it would seem to me that a simple, bipartisan vote to amend the underlying legislation would be relatively easy—instead, LHR, at this point, is indicative of the dangers of government autopilot. Autopilot is fine in clear, consistent weather, but it can be disastrous during unpredictable storms—and the world has been hit by a storm in 2020.

I’m not presenting an argument against lead-hazard control: I don’t know enough to say whether lead-hazard control remains, in the absence of a pandemic, a (relatively) good idea or a (relatively—compared to other health-related activities) bad idea. I’ll posit, however, that a lot more people are going to die and suffer from COVID-19 this year, than will die or suffer from lead-based paint, and the failure to change course in the face of new events is evidence of deeper malaise.

Posted on Leave a comment

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.”