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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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Don’t Believe Everything You See On TV or Government Websites: The FY ’24 HRSA NAP NOFO Shows Why Forecasted RFPs Aren’t A Sure Thing

Note: this is the first post written by our new Associate, Liz Rego (erego@seliger.com).

Some federal agencies, like the Department of Education and the Health Services and Resources Administration (HRSA), but not all, publish forecasts of when certain funding opportunities will be issued, usually before the start of the federal fiscal year on October 1.

Case in point: Last July 3, HRSA published a forecast on grants.gov that the FY 2024 New Access Points (NAP) Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO, which is HRSA-speak for RFP), would be published on December 12 with a February 2024 deadline. A new NAP NOFO is a big deal, as they are only published every three years or so and NAP is the best way for an FQHC to expand or for a nonprofit healthcare provider to become an FQHC. Unsurprisingly, when the NOFO did not appear on December 12, our FQHC clients started sending “what gives” e-mails. We guessed it had something to do with the screwed up FY ’24 federal budget process, and this was confirmed when one FQHC client reached out to her HRSA Program Officer and received the following response: “Although FY24 NAP funding has been forecasted, HRSA does not currently have a NAP funding opportunity open and does not plan to post it until we have a better sense of the FY 2024 budget.” So, when congress finally reconciles the different versions of the FY 2024 budget passed in December by the Senate and House, there will be a deluge of RFPs published quickly, with grant-writing chaos ensuing. HRSA recently undated their grants.gov NAP forecast, with the NOFO now expected to published on February 12 and has an April 12 deadline. Potential applicants can curse the federal government and those lying forecasters, but the sad reality is that the “Golden Rule” of grant seeking is that those with the gold make the rules.

To be fair, many forecasts are not any more accurate than projected RFP issuance dates. Meteorologists, for example, get a bad rap. For as long as the “TV weatherman” has existed, meteorologists have been the subject of ridicule in rain or shine, quite literally. Growing up in the Northeast, there was nothing more exciting for a kid than a snow day, and nothing more disappointing than a “false alarm.” All too many times, however, Mike Seidel* told us we were expecting a massive blizzard, schools announced closures, we pulled out our snowsuits** and sleds for the next day, and by 10 o’clock the next morning it was clear that we wouldn’t see even an inch of snow that day. As upsetting as this was for those of us hoping to make a snowman, at least we kids still got the day off from school; it was infinitely more upsetting for our parents, who were now stuck home with their children on a Tuesday for no reason, and those children now had absolutely no desire to go outside in the snow-less 25-degree weather. My father reserved some choice words for Mike and his fellow meteorologists on days like these, but to paraphrase sans expletives, he always said something to the effect of, “Those idiots are the only people who get paid to guess, and they get paid whether they are right or wrong so why would they care?!”

Okay, so the G-rated paraphrasing of my blue-collar “Masshole” father sounds absolutely nothing like him, but I’m sure you and your parents have said some variant of the same thing. I learned at a young age not to get my hopes up for snow, no matter what the weatherman says. Now having lived in Southern California for 14 years, ten of which were “dry years,” I’ve learned to apply that same “snow day” logic to rain forecasts. Whenever a friend says, “It’s supposed to rain this weekend!” my response is invariably, “Yeah, we’ll see.” Sometimes it does, but it seems that most of the time, it doesn’t. Since entering the world of grant writing, however, I have found that I can no longer agree 100% with my father’s sentiment; I need to give meteorologists a break- they are definitely not the only people getting paid to make predictions that seem to be inaccurate more often than not. It’s now part of my job to learn when “snow day” reasoning is required. There are some things that are just impossible to predict: Kanye West, the weather, and the government.

A forecasted RFP is not only similar to a questionable weather forecast, but also a bit like a film preview. How many of us got excited in 2019 for the last Bond film, No Time To Die, only to see its release delayed six times until October 2021? Maybe you’re not a Bond fan, but I think no matter what, we all became frustrated after being fed two full years of marketing for the film before it actually came to theaters. Life doesn’t always go as planned. In the case of, well, every film produced in the last four years, the Covid-19 pandemic was to blame for throwing a wrench into the works. In the case of recently forecasted RFPs, the federal government is to blame for the holdup. Yes, I know, you’re shocked!

When we research available grants, there is a reason that Seliger + Associates usually does not pay heed to “forecasted” RFPs- they aren’t real yet, and we know better than to create hype over the hypothetical, with the exception of opportunities like NAP, which are so highly anticipated by FQHCs (and we work for many FQHCs). A forecasted RFP is well-intentioned, and everyone appreciates a heads-up, but in the nonprofit world and the world of grant writing, it doesn’t do much good to plan for a grant opportunity that doesn’t yet exist. It’s a bit like being “engaged to be engaged,” if you know any of those couples (apologies if you are one of those couples). You either have a ring, or you don’t- no one cares if you “want to, you know, get a ring in six months maybe,” after you “figure some things out.” Funders are like significant others. They are the best. But letting us know in July that they plan on having funds for us in December, after they figure some things out, doesn’t help much. Then, December comes around after we waited patiently, but they still don’t have the ring- I mean funds- there’s no marriage proposal- I mean RFP- and we’re extremely disappointed, but we have no right to be because we’re the dummies that got our hopes up for nothing instead of going out and finding another S.O.! I mean, another grant.

RFP forecasts usually come out close to the start of the federal fiscal year on October 1 because, of course, that is when the federal budget used to be adopted. As you may know, that’s not how it really works anymore.*** For the last quarter of a century, Congress has funded the federal government through a series of Continuing Resolutions (CRs), rather than passing actual budgets, so the federal budget is never set in stone. Congress passed a CR last week, the third short-term spending bill approved in FY 2024, essentially buying them time until March to actually pass appropriations bills, since this of course has taken a backseat to holiday vacations and disagreements resulting in the now-constant threat of a “government shutdown.” So if you’re wondering what is going on with the federal budget, you’re not alone- no one knows! And if you’re wondering what happened to the RFPs forecasted for FY 2024, the answer is, the federal budget. At this rate, we will be close to halfway through the fiscal year before our government agrees on a budget for the fiscal year. No publicly traded corporation would be permitted to operate without a budget, but refer back to the Golden Rule of grant seeking.

In defense of you forecasters out there- meteorologists, government agencies, economists, psychics, etc.- I’ll point out that the definition of a forecast is a “prediction or estimate of future events” (i.e., an educated guess). Though “forecast” sounds more definitive than “prediction” or “estimate,” it is just that, not “a promise” or “an unconditional statement of fact regarding future events.” When a forecasted RFP doesn’t end up coming to fruition, our first instinct may be to blame those idiots that forecasted it for getting our hopes up, but as we all should have learned from Mike Seidel and The Weather Channel, some things are predictably unpredictable, and if we confuse forecast with fact, we might be the real idiots.

* A long-time TV weatherman is the Weather Channel’s Mike Seidel.
** If you didn’t look like Randy from  A Christmas Story, you were doing it wrong.
*** Since 1998, Congress has funded the federal government via a series of CRs, rather than passing actual budgets. The CRs use a “baseline budgeting” concept and mostly continue funding levels for discretionary grant programs from the previous CR, adjusted for inflation. Since a CR is a resolution, however, and not a budget, Congress can and sometimes does change funding levels during a FY by passing a new CR. Again, see the Golden Rule of grant seeking.

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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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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).

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FQHCs, Reproductive Health/Family Planning Services, and Planned Parenthood: An Uneasy but Symbiotic Relationship, Centered on Title X Funding

We often write about Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), in part because we often work for them in part because FQHCs illustrate many challenges facing other nonprofits. This post discusses a service that FQHCs could provide but mostly choose not to—a common circumstance among certain classes of nonprofits, like foster family agencies and substance abuse treatment providers.

To understand the dilemma, you have to know that the Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA) funds FQHCs under Section 330 of the Public Health Services Act and FQHCs are sometime referred to as “Section 330 providers.” While FQHCs do collect copays and most take insurance, a large chunk of their funding comes directly and indirectly (via Medicaid) from the feds. FQHCs are mandated to provide “integrated full life-cycle care” (HRSA-lingo here), including reproductive health/family planning services. Still, many of our FQHC clients are skittish about promoting these services and are consequently reluctant to seek other grants to support family planning.

Thus, FQHCs have effectively ceded the huge pot of Title X family planning grants ($288 billion in 2016) to specialized family planning clinics, which are mostly but not exclusively operated by local affiliates of Planned Parenthood. While Planned Parenthood provides great women’s reproductive and related preventative health care, with an emphasis on low-income women and girls, unlike FQHCs, their clinics do not provide full life-cycle care.

From what we can tell, FQHCs and Planned Parenthood clinics seem to operate in a symbiotic, but parallel manner, in which both stay out of each other’s turf (if you have even more specialized knowledge about this situation, feel free to leave a comment). There are about 650 Planned Parenthood clinics, which serve about 2.5 million women annually with family planning services (this does not include abortions). In contrast, there are about 1,400 FQHCs, which serve about 17 million patients annually, and these numbers are growing rapidly due to the expansion of Medicaid under the ACA. More than 50% of FQHC patients are women, so let’s call it 9 million. FQHCs serve many more women than Planned Parenthood, but readers would never know this from the media.

While I don’t know this for sure, one presumes this is because, bureaucratically speaking, there are at least two parts to Planned Parenthood that are structured separately: the family planning side, which is touted by progressives, and the abortion side, which is demonized by some conservatives. The nascent FY ’18 federal budget battle between the Trump administration/Republicans and Democrats is being fought partially over Title X funding. The media usually obfuscates the Tile X grant aspect, focussing instead on the much more sensational issue of Planned Parenthood funding.

I assume that, if Congress passed legislation making Planned Parenthood ineligible for Title X (unlikely but possible), other providers, like FQHCs, would start applying for Title X grants. In other words, no matter what happens, as far as I know, there are no proposed cuts to Title X (again, if you have specialized knowledge, leave a comment). It’s just a question of which agencies will provide Title X funded services and how those agencies will link with Planned Parenthood, which presumably would continue as the nation’s main abortion provider.

I know the potential competition between FQHCs and Planned Parenthood clinics is a big issue for Planned Parenthood, as Title X provides more or guaranteed funding to keep the lights on—a concern for all nonprofits. This basic issue was confirmed by several interesting pieces I found and that the Alan Guttmacher Institute published (it’s more or less the research affiliate of Planned Parenthood).* For example, this article makes the curious argument that FQHCs couldn’t expand to provide family planning service now being provided by Planned Parenthood:

FQHCs are an integral part of the publicly funded family planning effort in the United States, but it is unrealistic to expect these sites to serve the millions of women who currently rely on Planned Parenthood health centers for high-quality contraceptive care.

As a grant writer, I admire the carefully crafted but entirely specious reasoning, which reminds me of our needs assessments, I’m pretty confident that FQHCs would have no trouble picking up the slack and the Title X grants—if they wanted to. We have some FQHC clients with over 40,000 patients, and at that size they can begin to resemble something larger than a community clinics. At the moment, they’re mostly reluctant to tangle with Planned Parenthood—but, again, they could.

And they might.


* The Guttmacher Institute is a great source, albeit one with a point of view, for studies and data relating family planning, teen pregnancy, and the like. We sometimes use their citations in writing needs assessments. If you’re curious about research organizations with a point of view, Daniel Drezner’s book The Ideas Industry is good.

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Hard Times for Housing Nonprofits and the New York Times Provides a Pretty Good Example of Proposalese

Last week a former client and a prospective client called; both of their nonprofits have been involved in affordable housing development, foreclosure assistance, fair housing counseling and the like, but both have also seen their grant and other resources wither in recent years. Housing nonprofits are experiencing the negative side of the grant waves we’ve written about. Right now there isn’t a lot of government or foundation funds available for affordable housing issues: the Great Recession is officially over*, the foreclosure crisis has receded in most places, and the policy view of housing affordability has mostly shifted from social/legal/regulatory concerns (e.g., overt housing discrimination, redlining, predatory lending/foreclosures, etc.) to economic concerns, as best articulated by Matt Yglesias in The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think. The biggest affordability challenge is the inability to build housing at all in many superstar cities, like L.A., New York, and Seattle, due to NIMBY problems.

My advice to both callers was the same: they can a) change the mission of their nonprofit to something being pushed by the grant waves (e.g., job training, primary health care, re-integration of ex-offenders, supplemental education for out-of-school youth and young adults, etc.), b) put their nonprofit into suspended hibernation while waiting for the grant gods to once again smile on affordable housing, or c) try to use the emerging theme of continuing housing segregation that has risen in public consciousness through incessant media coverage of public outrage and civil disturbances in Ferguson, MO and Baltimore following police violence against unarmed African American youth.

Today, the New York Times published “An Indelible Black-and-White Line,” which illustrates pretty well how to build a grant needs argument around the civil disturbances and obvious housing segregation in most American cities. This paragraph from the article could have been ripped from our proposals:

“Such is the case in Ferguson. The part where Mr. Brown died is a predominantly black east side neighborhood where residents have complained of police harassment and high crime in a cluster of apartments that stretches into the census tract with the most Section 8 renters in Missouri. Life is much different just two miles away in the city’s amenity-filled central business district, surrounded by pockets of predominantly white, affluent neighborhoods with sturdy brick and clapboard homes.”

We often use variations on the life-is-different riff when writing about disadvantaged target neighborhoods embedded in affluent cities.

The article is a pastiche of misinformation and half-truths that conflates the history of Section8 Housing Certificates with desegregation efforts, fair housing, income equality, and general malaise in low-income communities. Section 8 was not created as a “tool for desegregation,” as stated in the article. The primary tool for desegregation in the 1970s and 1980s was school busing, not Section 8. Section 8 was a Nixon/Ford era reform that was supposed to encourage private developers to build more affordable housing. In the early days of the Reagan administration in the mid-80s, Section 8 was expanded as direct HUD financing programs for affordable housing developments were largely eliminated.

It wasn’t until the Clinton era that Section 8 was seen as something of a desegregation tool, but this shift occurred primarily within the context of then new HUD HOPE VI Program, (or “Hopeless VI,” as we used to call it around the office). This bizarre program resulted in the demolition of thousands of last-resort public housing units, replacing the original developments with “mixed-income” developments and providing Section 8 Certificates (now known as Housing Choice Vouchers or “HCV”) for poor, mostly African Americans, residents displaced by HOPE VI.

But Section 8 never resulted in many new housing units being built, so HCV holders were (and are) forced to compete with working poor and middle-class renters for the same limited pool of housing. Landlords will avoid accepting HCVs if they can—not necessarily because they’re racist (although they might be), but because the building/unit has to pass a HUD inspection to be certified for Section 8. The building and unit also have to undergo annual re-inspections.

Most landlords won’t sign up for this unless they’re having difficulty renting the units. They also prefer wealthier tenants with good histories, when those tenants are available. That’s why Section 8 units end up being in less desirable neighborhoods. The other reality is that the HCV holders often self-segregate for social, cultural and family reasons. While a single mom may be able to use her HCV in a nice, affluent suburb, that won’t help her much if her support system for childcare (e.g., extended family members) is back in the lower-income community she’s leaving. Also, she might not want be far from her church and friends. Whole Foods probably doesn’t sell chitlings** or chicken necks.

The Times article avoids all of these details and instead concocts a witch’s brew that explains all of the ills of low-income African American neighborhoods away by blaming everything on Section 8 caused segregation. While this is mostly nonsense, it’s perfect reasoning for a grant proposal for housing nonprofits—like my two callers last week—trying to get funding. We’ll use these concepts for any housing related proposals we write in the coming months.

If this stuff gets past the editors at the New York Times it’ll definitely get past foundation program officers, who don’t know any more than editors and probably know even less.


* In our grant proposals, no matter what is actually going on with the economy, the target neighborhood is always being buffeted by the current recession, the lingering effects of the last recession and/or the looming next recession.

** Anyone who’s worked and/or lived in African American communities like I have, knows that chitlings remain a favored delicacy. To test your knowledge, take the somewhat out of date, but still fun Chitling Test (also known as the Dove Counterbalance General Intelligence Test). I had the privilege of being a colleague of the test’s creator, Adrian Dove, in the mid-1970s, when we both worked in Mayor Tom Bradley’s office. Here’s a sample question: “Cheap chitlings (not the kind you purchase at a frozen food counter) will taste rubbery unless they are cooked long enough. How soon can you quit cooking them to eat and enjoy them? (a) 45 minutes, (b) 2 hours, (c) 24 hours, (d) 1 week (on a low flame), (e) 1 hour.”

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How Computers Have Made Grant Writing Worse

In most ways computers have made our lives better. In some, however, they’ve made our lives worse.* In grant writing, computers have enabled a level of neurotic, anxious behavior that was simply impractical before frictionless communications. Some of those problems include:

1. More drafts.

Isaac existed before computers. Well, technically, so did I, but I wasn’t writing proposals. In the pre-computer era, most proposals only went through two drafts: a first and a final. First drafts were written long-hand on legal pads, dictated, or roughly typed. The second/final draft would be typed by a secretary with great typing skills. Still, the final draft usually had typos, “white out” blotches and lacked any formatting apart from paragraph indents and tabs to create “tables.” Since proposals couldn’t logistically go through numerous drafts or interim drafts, two drafts were sufficient.

The perpetual editing make possible by computers also means that we can do something, someone else can do something (that is possibly wrong), and then we have to fix the messed up problems. Versioning can be endless, and in the last couple of months we’ve gotten into several seemingly unhappy versioning loops with clients. Versioning loops don’t make anyone happy, but the easy editability of documents means that it’s tempting for everyone to have a say (and everyone to make edits that later have to be carefully reverted). Computer editing also makes it more tempting to change project concepts mid-stream, which is not a good idea.

2. Longer drafts.

In keeping with point one, proposals can now be much, much longer. We’ve worked on some Head Start drafts that topped out around 100 pages. That’s ridiculous, but computers make it possible in general to write far longer drafts. “Longer” is not necessarily “better.” A longer draft has more room for internal inconsistencies (of the sort that can kill your application, as described at the link).

Longer drafts fatigue writer and reader. We’re the iron men of writers, so we of course never feel fatigue. But few writers are as sharp at page 80 of a proposal as they are at page 10. Few readers read page 80 with the same care as page 10. Isaac and occasionally speculate about how funny it would be to drop a sentence, late in a proposal, like “I’ll give you $20 if you read this sentence” or “Don’t you think 50 Shades of Grey really does have a legitimate point?” We’d never do that, but we bet that if we did, few reviewers would notice.

3. More screwing around and eternal availability.

In ye olden days, one had to call someone to express an idea or make a change or just to badger them. Since fax machines weren’t common until the 80s, drafts to other offices/readers had to be mailed or sent by courier. Copies were harder to make, so editors had to do one review, not 12. Today we’re available for eternal electronic pinpricks via email, and yet every pinprick has a cost. We mostly ignore those costs, but they add up.

It’s easier to spend way too much time changing “that” to “which” and “which” to “that.” Sometimes such changes are appropriate but too many of them lead to tremendous drag on the entire project. They cost scarce attention.

4. Convoluted instructions.

Before computers, attachments were (generally) fewer, RFPs were shorter, and instructions were clearer because 20 people didn’t have the opportunity to “contribute” their thoughts and words. Now instructions can be infinitely convoluted, weird data sources can be more easily managed, and random attachments of almost infinite size can be ordered.

Sometimes, too, applicants will be tempted to add extra attachments because they can. Don’t do that.

5. Data mandates that don’t exist, or don’t exist properly.

We’ve written before about phantom data and its attendant problems. Computers and the Internet often tempt funders into asking for more esoteric data. Before the Internet, most data had to be manually, laboriously extracted from Census tables and similar paper-based sources. This meant long hours at a library or Census office. Now it’s possible to request all sorts of weird data, and sometimes that data can’t be found. Or, if various applicants do find it, it comes from all sorts of methodologies that may not be comparable. Poverty rates are one good example of this. Is the 2013 poverty rate 14.5% or 4.8%? Depends on the data used. And that’s for a well-known metric! Others are worse.

6. Email has also shifted the “Cover-Your Ass” (CYA) memo to the “CYA” email.

The famous CYA memo predates email, but email has made conversations that would once have been ephemeral permanent. Anything you say or write can be used to hang you, as innumerable politicians (like former Congressman Weiner) and everyday people have learned. This has consequences of all sorts, as teenagers have discovered in the course of sexting and as even spies have learned (that link goes to an article about a totally crazy hit the Israelis pulled in Dubai: if you abandon this post to read it, I wouldn’t blame you at all).

Permanent records mean that nothing can be ignored and that everything can be interpreted in the worst possible light. It is now possible for clients to send us (and us to send them) dozens of emails in a way that never happened in the snail-mail world. In a snail-mail world, each missive took a day or two send, receive, and reply.

The new email world means we—and clients—can waste fantastic amounts of time mulling over minor issues and misunderstandings via email. Anything sent by email lives forever, so it must be written with great care because it can later be used to hang the writer. Every word has to be considered as if it would be judged by a judge and jury. That means a level of precision is necessary in a way that wouldn’t be necessary on a phone call.

7. Conclusion

In Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology, Kentaro Toyama writes: “It’s often said that technology is a cost-saver; or that ‘big data’ makes business problems transparent; or that social media brings people together; or that digital systems level playing fields. These kinds of statements are repeated so often that few people question them. Yet none of them is a die-cast truth.” Toyama is right, and we’ve witnessed the problems of relentless communication, which let people endlessly niggle over minor, unimportant points, while misunderstanding bigger, more important pictures.

This post is an attempt to share the bigger picture.


* For one example of how things are worse, see Alone Together by Sherry Turkle or Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male by Philip Zimbardo. We aren’t luddites and aren’t condemning technology—indeed, our business couldn’t exist as it does without technology—but we are cognizant of the drawbacks.

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More on Using the Critical Path Method (CPM) in Grant Writing

This post expands on an issue raised in “No Calls, No Bother: ‘Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule’ and the Grant Writer’s Work.” Specifically, the critical path method (CPM), which is a jargon-sounding acronym that actually conveys useful information. CPM has been around for decades and is commonly used in construction, software development, and manufacturing. CPM can also be used effectively in developing human service project concepts and writing compelling grant proposals that accurately reflect the project concept. We write proposals for some federal programs, like the Department of Labor YouthBuild program and the HRSA Service Area Competition (SAC), that are essentially cookbooks. YouthBuild and SAC proposals should reflect standard project concepts required by the funder.

But most federal and state RFPs, as well as foundation guidelines, allow the applicant some creative leeway. In these situations, our clients often only have a general idea of their project concept until they read our first proposal draft. This first draft conforms to the often conflicting RFP/guidelines structure but also expresses the key 5 Ws and H that every proposal should delineate.

First drafts often make the lightbulb go off, and the client will make complex and sometimes contradictory or irrelevant changes to the draft—but ignore what’s really important, like missing data, required partners, management staff experiences, etc. This is likely because most nonprofits don’t use CPM, relying instead on brainstorming and visioning exercises led by organizational development facilitators or, even worse, the management team.

Here’s how to use and think about CPM in grant writing:

  • Figure out the critical path. This starts with identifying required proposal elements and attachments. To be considered for any grant, a proposal must first be deemed technically correct by the funding agency following submission. To assist our clients, we email a documents memo immediately after we scope the project concept. A member of our team goes through the RFP in great detail, marking up relevant sections. The documents memo is prepared based on this close reading and sent to the client; it is a bulleted list that includes items needed to complete the submission package. In effect the documents memo is not only a check list but a layout of the critical path to achieve the goal of submitting a technically correct application in advance of the deadline. Still, many clients ignore all or parts of the documents memo until near the deadline, focusing instead on non-critical path issues like how changing “which” to “that,” inserting PR boilerplate randomly in the draft, and the like.
  • Make sure the proposal includes relevant data to build the needs statement logic argument. Our first drafts usually have data we’ve found along with blanks for any information we can’t have, like socioeconomic characteristics of current clients or client outcome metrics. In second drafts, we only leave in critical blanks, and any that remain unknown get re-written as generalities in the final draft.* Some final proposals are sent in missing obvious CPM elements, because, as bad as this is, it’s better than blowing the deadline. We’ve seen proposals that are missing critical pieces get funded anyway.
  • Look for internal inconsistencies in the narrative, which will creep in through edits by multiple editors/readers from your agency as the narrative goes from first to final draft. Then make sure the narrative is consistent with the budget, budget narrative, org chart, job descriptions and other attachments. This sounds easy but readers generate opinions exponentially, not linearly.
  • Make sure the proposal has all required attachments, no matter what, such as letters of support and/or collaboration, financial statements, audits, 501(c)(3) letters of determination, etc. This is where the check list aspect of the documents memo comes in handy.
  • Resist the urge to include non-requested attachments unless the RFP/guidelines specifically allow this. Even then, be judicious in selecting attachments. No grant reviewer wants to see a newspaper clipping of your Executive Director smiling on the Oprah set. For online submissions like grants.gov, it’s important that the complete application file doesn’t bloat to 20 MB by including huge attachments like drawings/pictures/videos, or you might encounter upload challenges.
  • Carefully follow formatting instructions regarding font type and size, margins, page limits, character/word count limits for online submissions that have text input boxes, etc.

As daunting a gauntlet** as the above may seem, it’s actually not that hard if you approach the process with CPM in mind and keep your eye on the prize of winning the grant, not internal management egos. Grant writing is about methodical attention to detail more than it is about anything else. A grant proposal is many things, but it is definitely not a PR piece.


* We a prepare first, second and final draft. More drafts are not needed and don’t help, as the more drafts and readers you have, the more inconsistencies are likely to creep in. You won’t see them because you’ll have read the drafts too many times, but they’ll stand out in neon to a fresh grant reviewer.

** The correct usage is actually gantlet, but gauntlet reads and sounds better and has become accepted usage.

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Some Positive Changes in Federal Grant Grants.Gov Submission Requirements Emerge

Faithful readers know that I’ve been writing federal grant proposals since the last ice age.* For most of the last four decades, federal grant writing has changed little, other than in obvious tech-related ways—computers, online databases, quick and reliable digital literature/data searches, easy access to applicant background info and so on. I recently realized that incremental changes, glacial in speed though they may be, have begun to have a cumulative impact on the way in which proposals, and especially federal grant proposals, are prepared.

The biggest change in federal proposal preparation was the switch from hard copy to digital submissions, starting around 12 years ago. While at first there were a number of portals developed by various federal agencies, over the years most, but not all, have switched to Grants.Gov. For the first five or so years, Grants.Gov was incredibly badly coded, and the upload process was often uncertain and dicey. In recent years, the reliability of Grants.Gov has improved dramatically and the required attachments mercifully streamlined.

In the bad old days of paper submissions, federal agencies usually required a zoo of attachments, like target area maps, evaluator CVs, key staff resumes, job descriptions, organization charts, evidence of 501(c)3) status, bylaws, financial statements, letters of support, MOUs, and the dreaded logic model. The narratives themselves were long, like attention spans back in those days, with maximums sometimes reaching 50 single-spaced pages. It was not uncommon to end up with a 150-page grant application, which usually had be submitted with a “wet-signed” original and up to ten copies. Sometimes the FedEx boxes we shipped to HUD or the Department of Education weighed over ten pounds.

In the early days of Grants.Gov, these attachment requirements continued, making the upload process very complicated (try uploading a 10 megabyte financial statement attached to a Grants.Gov kit file for example) and sometimes impossible, as there might not be an attachment slot for a given required attachment. As time passed, federal RFPs began to strip away attachments or even require only a couple of consolidated attached files. This is much simpler and makes the grants.gov kit file preparation easier and significantly more reliable.

Most federal agencies have also reduced the maximum length of the narrative and settled on a double-spaced, single-sided page formatting convention. For example, Department of Labor proposals now usually have 20 double-spaced page maximums for narratives. Before you say “hallelujah,” however, keep in mind that the RFPs themselves have not gotten any shorter–an RFP could easily be 150 pages, with the questions to be answered in the 20-page narrative actually being many pages longer than the maximum allowed response. It is often harder to write a shorter narrative of, say, 20 pages, than 40 pages, because the writer faces the “building-a-ship-in-a-bottle” problem. Furthermore, despite severe page limitations, all of the headers/sub-headers must be included to enable reviewers to easily find your responses.

Other interesting RFP changes involve the objective and evaluation sections, which are sometimes combined and always intertwined. Until recently, most RFPs let the grant writer essentially make up the objectives. Now, however, many ED programs like Student Supportive Services and HRSA programs like New Access Points provide more or less fill-in-the-blank objectives. I’m fairly sure this trend is to facilitate “apples-to-apples” comparisons by reviewers, but whatever the reason, it makes it easier to stay within the page limit. While evaluation section requirements used to be astoundingly complex, these days, RFP evaluation instructions tend to be much more straightforward and linked to specified objectives.

Now for the bad news. The budget and budget narratives sections have changed little. Grants.Gov kit files still use a variation of the venerable SF-424A budget form, which is actually a summary of federal object cost categories. To create the 424A, any sane person would use an Excel template. The only people in the US who do not seem to grasp the concept of a spreadsheet are federal RFP writers. There is still no federal Excel SF-424A template provided, although we use versions that we’ve developed over the years.** A well-laid-out Excel line-item budget not only displays each line item within each cost category, but it can also double as the budget narrative. See further in “Seliger’s Quick Guide to Developing Federal Grant Budgets.”

The budget narrative instructions in almost all federal RFPs are written as if the response is to be done on a typewriter, circa 1975. The budget narrative is also often excluded from the narrative page limit, with no page limit on the budget narrative. Although we would never do this, we’ve seen proposals from our clients in which the budget narrative is longer than the program narrative. Don’t do this—unless you think the tail wagging the dog is a good approach to life.


* Forty-four years to be exact, but who’s counting?

** We always provide clients with a draft budget in a handy reusable Excel template—which is one good reason to hire us!