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Grant writers for OJJDP’s FY ’23 “Mentoring for Youth Affected by Opioid and Other Substance Misuse”

Fifteen grants are available for the OJJDP’s* FY ’23 “Mentoring for Youth Affected by Opioid and Other Substance Misuse” program, which was released Mar. 17, 2023; both grant writers and potential applicants will note that, with $16.5 million available and an award ceiling of $2 million, the “Mentoring for Youth Affected by Opioid and Other Substance Misuse” is an attractive program. The “mentoring” part is unusual, too, because mentoring was in vogue in the ’90s and early ’00s, but over time it fell out of favor—likely because mentoring programs are hard to run (we’ve heard lots of stories from clients about just how hard, due to background checks, litigation risk, etc.).

If you and your organization are getting ready for the OJJDP FY ’23 “Mentoring for Youth Affected by Opioid and Other Substance Misuse” application process, contact us, or email us at seliger@seliger.com; Seliger + Associates has written dozens of funded mentoring grants.

Still, despite the fact that lots of programs and efforts from a variety of federal agencies have targeted opioid use disorder (OUD), and yet OUD remains a persistent challenge. The DEA, for example, recently ended the “waivered prescriber” requirement for most kinds of medication-assisted treatment (MAT), in an effort to expand access to MAT. MAT on its own hasn’t worked. Efforts like Twelve-Step programs haven’t worked. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and other “evidence-based practices” (EBPs) haven’t worked. Marketing and outreach campaigns haven’t worked. Community education hasn’t worked. Each of these may work for some people, but by “haven’t worked” I mean that they’ve not substantially ameliorated the opioid epidemic. They’ve not substantially ameliorated the p2p meth epidemic, which is what OJJDP is likely referring to in the “Other Substance Misuse” part of the “Mentoring for Youth Affected by Opioid and Other Substance Misuse” program. Grant writers should know the difference between what’s being stated explicitly and what’s being implied in an RFP.

So the OJJDP program that’s seeking to provide funding for mentoring is reasonable, given how much else has been and is being tried to reduce OUD, which has proven intransigent in the face of numerous public policy and grant efforts. Of those 15 available “Mentoring for Youth Affected by Opioid and Other Substance Misuse” grants, 10 are for “project sites”—which means “normal nonprofits” and five are for statewide or regional projects. For the first category, OJJDP wants applicants to already have at least three years of mentoring program experience. What “mentoring program experience” means is, however, somewhat left to the applicant, and organizations that want to apply but are weak on this area should let us help them apply some grant writing magic to their challenges.

The project’s goals and objectives are typical, and what you’d expect. Curiously, the RFP doesn’t give any guidance around the expected total cost per participant (unless I missed that line in the preliminary read). Though I don’t think OJJDP says as much, I’d guess that having some linkage to MAT, even if only for the families of targeted youth, will likely be helpful for successful applicants.

Why are mentoring programs hard to run? Recruiting mentors, background-checking mentors, and retaining mentors—they’re all hard. It’s also not possible to make sure that every single mentor is volunteering for what might be construed as the “right” reasons. And if one bad mentor isn’t screened out, then that can lead to disaster for the entire program and even agency. Some organizations solve this problem by only allowing mentor-mentee contact in specific places and times, but that can wind up not feeling much like an actual mentoring program. But it is a solution.

If you’re working on that OJJDP application, contact us to further discuss your organization and how we can help.


“OJJDP” standing for the old-school acronym: “Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.” It’s been a while since I’ve heard about Juvenile Justice, outside of anachronistic government sub-agencies. OJJDP is in turn part of the Department of Justice (DOJ).

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What counts as an eligible service area for SAMHSA’s “Resiliency in Communities After Stress and Trauma” (ReCAST) program?

Long ago, we wrote about what grant writers and applicants should do when confronted by a poorly organized RFP; because little external pressure pushes federal agencies to write RFPs that make sense, one finds too many RFPs that leave a lot of questions. SAMHSA’s “Resiliency in Communities After Stress and Trauma” (ReCAST) Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) is a case in point: eligible applicants are those “communities that have recently faced civil unrest, community violence, and/or collective trauma within the past 24 months.” Okay: the NOFO will surely get more specific, right? But the ReCAST NOFO says that “Community violence is defined as the exposure to intentional acts of interpersonal violence committed in public spaces by individuals who are not related to the victim.” Okay: but how much violence? Do two murders count? Do two instances of battery count? Almost every city of any size has likely experienced at least two “intentional acts of interpersonal violence” committed by strangers in the prior 24 months. So how much is enough? Is more better, for purposes of being funded by this program? How are applicants to judge the feasibility of being funded? Being able to have some sense of eligibility is key, because preparing and submitting a SAMHSA application isn’t a minor endeavor.

Then there is the issue of “collective trauma.” Do natural disasters count? I’ve read the definitions of “collective trauma” on pages 8 – 9 of the ReCAST NOFO, and I’ve gone through all 41 uses of the word “trauma,” but I don’t see an answer to that specific question. Natural disasters are violent and often cause injury and death, which makes me lean towards “yes,” but the emphasis on “civil unrest” seems to point to a very specific set of issues that SAMHSA has in mind.

So I sent an email to the SAMHSA contact person, Jennifer Treger, asking her a version of the above. She wrote back: “Thank you for your inquiry. Please refer back to the definition that you have pointed out on pages 8-9 of the funding opportunity. If you determine your community meets the eligibility based on the definitions, please feel free to submit an application.” But how am I, or anyone else, supposed to judge whether a specific community is eligible based on that vague definition? I tried asking her in another version, and she reiterated, unhelpfully, that “We can only respond to what is in the NOFO.”

She also wrote that: “You can determine if you feel your community meets the definition for Collective Trauma as stated in the NOFO.” But the problem is that how I “feel” doesn’t matter at all to SAMHSA in determining eligibility; only SAMHSA’s judgments matter (SAMHSA has the money). It’d be useful for SAMHSA to list, in its view, which communities have had sufficient “civil unrest, community violence, and/or collective trauma within the past 24 months” to qualify for ReCAST. Or, alternately, what metrics they’d use. An FBI Uniform Crime Rate (UCR) of x per 1,000 people, for example, would be a specific metric.

Too many federal agencies love the latitude that vagueness implies. It’s hard to advise our clients on whether they should apply to ReCAST without more specifics, but those specifics evidently aren’t going to be forthcoming. I guess we’ll have to try to look at our feelings and our client’s feelings, and hope SAMHSA feels what we feel.

For more on similar matters, see RFP Lunacy and Answering Repetitive or Impossible Questions: HRSA and Dental Health Edition.

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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

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The Dept. of Transportation (DOT) issues first RFP under the “Bipartisan Infrastructure Law:” “Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity” (RAISE)

The Department of Transportation (DOT) just issued an RFP for the Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE) Grants program; this being the federal government, the actual name of this program is the “Local and Regional Project Assistance Program in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (“Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’)”, which is even longer than the short title we shoehorned into the title of this post. Why have one program name when two will do?

Although RAISE isn’t a new program, this RFP is significant because it appears to be the first one issued under the recently passed “Infrastructure Bill.” While in FY ’20 there was a paltry $1B available for RAISE, this year there’s $1.5B (and yes, that’s “billion”). The max grants are $5M in urban areas and $1M in rural areas, so hundreds of RAISE grants will be made. The RFP says RAISE grants may be used for “surface transportation infrastructure projects that will have a significant local or regional impact.” The deadline isn’t yet published, curiously, but there’ll be an update notice published on Jan. 30 in grants.gov that should have the deadline.

Eligible applicants include states, local governments, transportation districts and agencies—including ports, and Indian Tribes. While nonprofits aren’t directly eligible, they could be part of an applicant consortium and receive sub-grants for things like environmental justice, equity, workforce development, ethnic-specific community outreach and engagement, etc.

RAISE and other transportation programs, new and old, to be funded by the Infrastructure Bill, are really aimed at what is sometimes called the Concrete Lobby. The Concrete Lobby is an unholy alliance of construction companies, developers, local elected officials and appointed bureaucrats, unions, investment banks, lobbyists, chambers of commerce, and similar self-interested parties. In many ways, the Concrete Lobby is an analog of the Military-Industrial Complex that likes politicians who like foreign wars, so the government will buy more bullets. In this case, the Concrete Lobby wants the government to “buy more concrete.”

When I was a Community Development Director for CA cities in the 1980s, we always paid close attention to local Concrete Lobby members because they could easily and often would hand-pick candidates for local office, disrupting planning and redevelopment efforts (despite their efforts, though, local municipalities still severely restrict housing construction). Environmental groups and other NIMBYs typically opposed the Concrete Lobby, using tools like the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and State Offices of Historic Preservation (SHPO) to tie up or defeat local development projects, including those aimed at transit and transportation.* We see the results today: traffic gridlock and spectacularly high housing prices that hurt the poor the most, but hurt almost everyone. Depending on how the city I was working for felt about a particular project, we’d either support or surreptitiously attempt to sabotage environmental and NIMBY opposition. If you’re an environmental activist, keep in mind that, while you’re playing a one to five year game, the Concrete Lobby and their sycophants in government are playing a 30 to 50 year game.

With so much grant money now sloshing around looking for transportation projects and the rise of “woke environmentalism,” I’m guessing that the Concrete Lobby will try to co-opt opposition by most environmental groups with visions of subcontracts, as well as the virtue signaling sacraments of environmental justice and the suddenly popular shibboleth of “equity.” If you represent an eligible applicant for RAISE grants or a nonprofit interested in subcontracts, this is the time to look for good project concepts. We’ll soon post a companion article on how to develop a competitive grant proposal for RAISE and its ilk. These kinds of proposals are very different than typical human services proposals as the narratives are short, but the attachments are huge, resulting in what we call “layer cake” applications.


* When I was Community Development Director for the City of San Ramon in the San Francisco East Bay around 1990, we worked hard to get the regional transit authority to add bus lines through San Ramon to connect to the BART heavy rail system. We imagined that our largely upper middle class and progressive residents would love the idea of reducing use of cars for commuting. They were environmentalists, right? Wrong! Within two weeks of the new buses, which were standard size or larger articulated buses, rolling though town, about 200 people in matching anti-bus t-shirts showed up at a city council meeting denouncing the intrusive buses that were keeping them awake at night and “ruining their quality of life.” I had the thankless task of facing this mob. The City Council immediately caved and directed me to renegotiate with the transit authority. The result was to remove most trunk bus lines and add a few mini-buses, which defeated the point of connecting to BART for commuting.

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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.

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Grant writers and climate change: The Department of Energy’s Direct Air Capture program

The Department of Energy (DOE) just issued an unusual RFP, for a subject I can’t recall seeing the DOE previously wanting to fund fund: direct air capture (DAC) of CO2, the whole name of which will exhaust even patient readers: “Direct Air Capture Combined With Dedicated Long-Term Carbon Storage, Coupled to Existing Low-Carbon Energy.” Right now, DAC is in its infancy; this 2019 article summarizes the DAC situation, and Stripe Climate covers the overall need for DAC; Seliger + Associates hasn’t yet worked on a DAC project, although we have worked on projects related to geothermal energy, lithium metal, lithium batteries, flow batteries, resource recovery, and probably a few more I’m leaving out.* In these assignments, we utilize the approach described in “How we write scientific and technical grant proposals,” and we’re eager to work on DAC projects—if you’ve found your way here and are looking for a DOE grant writing, by all means give us a call at 800.540.8906 ext. 1, or email us at seliger@seliger.com. DAC’s immaturity makes it a particularly striking area for work, and, while the DOE program only has five awards available, it does have $15 million for grants “to better understand system costs, performance, as well as business case options for existing DAC technologies co-located with low-carbon thermal energy sources or industrial facilities.”

Specific activities are listed, too: “The objective of this FOA is to execute and complete front-end engineering design (FEED) studies of advanced DAC systems capable of removing a minimum of 5,000 tonne/yr. net CO2 from air based on a life cycle analysis (LCA), suitable for long duration carbon storage (i.e., geological storage or subsurface mineralization) or CO2 conversion/utilization (e.g., including, but not limited to, synthetic aggregates production, concrete production, and low carbon synthetic fuels and chemicals production).” It’s likely that the firms specializing in FEED don’t specialize in grant writing or storytelling, and that’s where we come into play.

DAC is still extremely expensive and infeasible on a scale that would affect global climate change, but it’s also getting cheaper fast—and that’s the same pattern of falling costs we’ve seen with batteries, solar, and wind—all of which have consistently fallen in price far faster than even their most ardent advocates would’ve hoped. Solar, wind, and batteries now appear to have a lower levelized cost of energy (LCOE) than methane plants, in many parts of the world, and, if another power source deals with baseload power, they can provide around 50% of total energy.

Ideally, forty years ago, humans would’ve collectively acted on the need for carbon emission reductions by building out nuclear power, introducing carbon taxes, and taking similar measures. We collectively did the opposite, and global CO2 levels are now in the 420 parts per million (ppm) range, and they’re almost certainly going to rise above 500 ppm in the coming decades. Pre-industrialize global CO2 rates were in the 230 – 250 ppm range, and, the last time carbon dioxide ppm was this high, the world was in the range of five degrees celsius warmer than it is now—or has been through human history. In the scheme of the world economy, $15 million isn’t a lot—but it’s a start.

*Several times over the years, we’ve gotten calls from inventors pitching the elusive perpetual motion machine. While fun to talk to these guys (and they’re always guys) we’ve so far declined to accept one of these jobs!

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Grant writers should recognize the real purpose of NOAA’s “Environmental Literacy Program”

Most social and human service agencies probably won’t notice the recently published National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) funding opportunity for the “Environmental Literacy Program: Increasing community resilience to extreme weather & climate change” program—how many nonprofits are tracking NOAA, which is probably doing interesting work that is nonetheless not relevant to a typical nonprofit’s workflow? But the “Environmental Literacy Program” is different, and those same social and human service agencies should slow down and look at this one, because the program has $5 million available for 12 grants up to $500,000 to have local community members “participate in formal and/or informal education experiences that develop their knowledge, skills, and confidence” that will help them become knowledgeable about environmental issues.” Oh yeah? What’s that mean, in practice?

Smart nonprofit executive directors who read this description will sit up straighter and think, “walkin’ around money,” because the rest of the description says participants will do things like “participate in formal and/or informal education experiences that develop their knowledge, skills, and confidence to: 1) reason about the ways that human and natural systems interact globally and locally.” In other words, a grantee for this program is nominally going to do some outreach and education, neither of which will be measured. In practice, a grantee will hire a few staff, like outreach workers and peer educators, who are (of course, of course!) going to do some environmental literacy—but they’re also going to be talking to people about what else they need. If there’s a class of 15 low-income youth officially getting “environmental literacy education,” and one mentions that her mom lost her job because the kid’s little brother needs to be watched during the day, the program staff is going to try to hook mom up with a Head Start slot and other supportive services. How else can one stretch these amorphous dollars? Well, environmental education is going to involve practicing reading skills (“What does this sentence about carbon emissions differences between bikes and cars imply?”). A canny nonprofit may do “environmental literacy” and per-capitated tutoring services paid for by a state or county at the same time, using the same staff person. Or, a nonprofit that is losing a grant to provide healthcare navigation services for Medicaid and insurance exchanges may re-train “Healthcare Navigators” to instead become “environmental literacy specialists,” and part of the intake flow for the environmental literacy education will involve checking the status of health insurance: are some participants eligible for Medicaid but not enrolled? Time to enroll them, and make sure their families are on the rolls of the local FQHC. As we’ve written about before walkin’ around money grants are very important because they become the glue that holds the agency together and if effect can be a form of paying for indirect costs.

The funding agency—NOAA—for this program may be unusual, but the ends to which the money will be put are not. This is also the kind of grant opportunity that’s easy to miss, but that we include in our email grant newsletter. Executive directors know that grants like “Environmental Literacy Education” help the doors stay open and the staff stay employed. The official purposes and the true purposes of the grant may differ.

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“Currently, [Census] data is not loading properly:” DOL’s YouthBuild FY ’21

Needs assessment experts and data nerds know that factfinder.census.gov, the old primary portal into Census data, is dead, while the new census data portal, data.census.gov, is only somewhat alive. Last year, I started a post about the ways that data.census.gov is broken, but I abandoned it because it was too boring, even for me; last year, data.census.gov was hellaciously slow, often taking 10 seconds for a query (a needs assessment may require dozens or hundreds of queries), and many internal links simply didn’t work. Some of that seems to have been fixed: back then, for example, trying to find specific sub-data sets, like educational attainment, for a given zip code, didn’t work. I sent some feedback to the Census contact person, who was very helpful, and eventually most of the problems disappeared.

But not all, it seems; this year’s DOL YouthBuild NOFA includes a humorous instruction regarding data requirements: pages 84 – 86 offer a 20-step algorithm for acquiring poverty data. That the algorithm has 20 steps and three pages is obviously bizarre: instruction 17 notes, “A table will come up showing the Total Population, the Number in Poverty, and the Poverty Rate. Currently, the data is not loading properly and at first only the overall U.S. data will load and you will not be able to scroll any further to the right to see anything else.” Oh? “Currently, the data is not loading properly:” that seems as if it could be the theme of the new Census interface.

About 10 years ago, there was a popular link-sharing site called Digg, and it introduced a now-notorious redesign that users hated, and those users consequently abandoned it en masse, leading to the rise of Reddit, a now-popular link-sharing site. If Digg had been more careful, it probably would have maintained its previous site design for those who wanted it, while introducing its new site design as a default, but not mandatory, experience. And then Digg would likely have iterated on the new design, figuring out what works. Reddit has somewhat learned this lesson; it now has two interfaces, one primarily living at old.reddit.com, which is maintained for people highly familiar with “the old Reddit,” and a newer one that is available by default at reddit.com. This bifurcation strategy allows a smooth transition between interfaces. The Census didn’t follow this strategy, and instead killed the old interface before the new one was really ready. Thus, bugs, like the bugs I’ve noticed, and bugs like those the Dept. of Labor noticed and mentioned specifically in YouthBuild NOFA. The more general lesson is fairly clear: be wary of big user interface changes. If you need Census data, though, you’ll have to use the interface, as is, since it’s the only one available.

For some reason—perhaps latent masochism?—Isaac continues to use MS Office 365 Outlook (not the free version) as an email client, instead of Apple’s Mail.app, or Thunderbird, and he tells me that every time he opens Outlook, he gets an invitation to try “the new Outlook” interface. So far, he’s resisted, but he also points out that most change is positive: when S + A started in 1993, there was effectively no commercial Internet, and the only way to get Census data was to go to Census Office, if you were near a big enough city, city hall, or a large library, where it was possible to thumb through the impenetrable Census books and maps. After a year or two in business, some vendor got the idea of putting the 1990 Census data on CDs (remember those), for quite a high price. Even though S + A was struggling to control costs, he bought the CDs, since they were better than hours in a Census Office or library. But then he had to buy, and install, CD drives in the Pentium PCs (remember those) we used. A couple of years later, he stumbled into a Census data portal set up by a random university, which worked! So, he tossed the CDs. When the 2000 Census came out, the feds essentially copied the university’s interface, creating factfinder.gov, and all was well until data.census.gov came alone. It’ll probably be better than the old interface, at some point.

Complaining is easy and making things better is hard. In the Internet era, both complainers and makers have been empowered, and I appreciate the difference between the two. People who have fundamental responsibility for a product, service, or organization, including the responsibility for making hard decisions that aren’t going to be popular with everyone, have a different perspective than those who can just complain and move on. So I don’t want to be a drive-by complainer, as so many are on “social” media, which seems poisonous to institutional formation and coherence. But, despite those caveats, the instruction from DOL regarding the Census being broken is perversely funny.

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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.

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First SAMHSA COVID-19 FOA out,”Emergency COVID-19,” but the deadline is April 10

With the recent passage of the $2 trillion CARES Act to provide COVID-19 relief, we’ve been closely monitoring the issuance of RFPs. On April 2, SAMHSA issued its first FOA (SAMHSA-speak for RFP) under the Act, “Emergency Grants to Address Mental and Substance Use Disorders During COVID-19.” But the submission due date is April 10, which is just 8 days from the posting. This is a model for what other federal coronavirus-related RFPs will likely look like. Although the RFP length is long, most of the content is SAMHSA boilerplate, and the narrative only needs to be 10 pages. Projects are expected to start by May 31. A May 31 start date may seem slow in this time of war, but it’s incredibly fast by the standards of federal agencies.

Only states, territories, and Indian Tribes are eligible applicants. We’re pointing this program out because RFPs for which nonprofit and public agencies are eligible will likely follow in the coming days, issued from a variety of federal agencies. If you’re a nonprofit, you need to be ready to act fast. Some nonprofits aren’t poised to act. We got a query email, for example, from a nonprofit back on March 3. I sent a fee-quote letter and follow-up email that day. The nonprofit disappeared, then, on March 25, sent an email asking for a further call two to three weeks later. Six or more weeks to make a decision to apply may work in normal times, but a culture of inactivity during a crisis is a real liability.