Search Results for: Grants.gov

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March Links: Stimulus Madness, Grants.gov, Health Care and More!

* We wrote about how to get your piece of the stimulus pie, noting that better-prepared organizations are more likely to be funded. Now the Washington Post reports that “Much in Obama stimulus bill won’t hit economy soon:”

It will take years before an infrastructure spending program proposed by President-elect Barack Obama will boost the economy, according to congressional economists.

[…]

Less than half of the $30 billion in highway construction funds detailed by House Democrats would be released into the economy over the next four years, concludes the analysis by the Congressional Budget Office. Less than $4 billion in highway construction money would reach the economy by September 2010.

* At The New Yorker, Steve Coll decided to blog the Stimulus Bill. Good luck on your journey! I, for one, would prefer not to wander in the desert for 40 years, but I’m glad someone else is willing to do so and perhaps bring something enlightening down from the mountain at the end. From his first post:

I particularly like the turn from the setting to the main title: “Begun and held at the City of Washington on Tuesday, the sixth day of January, two thousand and nine…An Act.” It’s all very grand—and a long way from the aesthetics of Fox News or MSNBC, which is how we usually encounter this material, in a summary of a summary.

And so, herewith launches an irregular series about the stimulus bill. I will read all of it, carefully, so that you don’t have to, and every so often I will stop and try to write something useful. It seems doubtful that the full law will prove either as funny or as morally edifying as the Old Testament, but I will do what I can.

* The Washington Post reports that Grants.gov Strains Under New Demand:

An early casualty of the stimulus package was identified by the Office of Management and Budget this week when OMB Director Peter Orszag told agency heads to plan for a possible meltdown of the government’s online grantmaking portal… “Grants.gov continues to experience system slowness due to the high volume of users,” the Grants.gov blog advised readers Tuesday.

The question is, how will we be able to distinguish new problems from business as usual?

* From the department of unintended consequences: “Doctor-Owned Hospitals Fare Poorly in Child Health Bill” says:

A bill making its way through Congress to provide more low-income children with health-insurance coverage could spell financial trouble for scores of hospitals owned by physicians.

The number of doctor-owned hospitals has tripled to about 200 since 1990, but they have long been mired in controversy. Supporters say these hospitals, which often focus on one or two lucrative services, such as cardiac care or orthopedics, are highly efficient, saving expenses for both patients and insurance programs, including Medicare.

Critics say physicians who refer patients to hospitals in which they have an ownership stake drive up costs, because they order more tests or perform unnecessary surgery. They argue that the physician-owned hospitals also cherry-pick the healthiest patients, which hurts the finances of other hospitals, the majority of which are nonprofits.

* More on unintended consequences and kids in “New Law Cripples Small and Independent Children’s Toy and Clothing Makers:”

The gist is that the new regs impose debilitating new testing requirements on anyone who makes, markets, or sells toys to to children. The bill is a hysteria-filled reaction to last year’s China lead scare, and its reach is really pretty incredible. Thrift stores, libraries, independent toymakers, people who hand-make toys and clothes to sell online, and on down the line are all going to be affected. It’s going to put thousands of people out of business. Just what the economy needs.

As is the case with most new regulations, the one group that won’t have any problem complying will be the giant toy companies—the very companies responsible for the lead scare that inspired the legislation in the first place.

* The New York Times is In Search of the Just-Right Desk. They neglect the best desk of all, however, which is one with a Humanscale keyboard system attached to it. The 5G system can be found for $225 – $300, and once one has it, the only question is having a surface on which to mount it. We wrote about such equipment issues in Tools of the Trade—What a Grant Writer Should Have.

* Although the Wall Street Journal editorial page is a notoriously lousy place to seek informed or balanced opinions, it does have a useful piece about What Medicaid Tells Us About Government Health Care. Ignore the political slams and focus on the parts about access to care:

The federal and state governments are equally culpable for the program’s troubles. The federal government matches state Medicaid spending, paying an average of 57% of costs. States expand enrollment in order to qualify for more federal aid. Insurance coverage has become the end itself, with states spreading resources widely but thinly — without enough attention to the quality of care, accessibility, or whether coverage was actually improving health. States have no obligation to rigorously measure health outcomes in order to qualify for more federal money.

One major healthcare problem in the United States is insufficient access to care, and in particular to specialty care. While insurance rates get enormous amounts of media coverage, virtually no one discusses how hard it can be to use public insurance like Medicare/Medicaid because relatively few providers accept them. We’ve worked for clients in relatively large cities that lack an adequate number of basic specialists like ob/gyns and cardiologists, and often have no practices that will accept Medicare/Medicaid. As the editorial notes, the preference for these programs has been on enrolling the maximum number of people—sometimes at the expense of the quality of care given:

For its part, the federal government has often prevented the states from taking steps to fix their own Medicaid programs, such as by devising outcome-based standards for evaluating performance, and de-emphasizing the goal of growing the number of covered people to focus more on improving the health of those served.

* Elsewhere in the WSJ, an article discusses “Heroin Program’s Deadly Toll: Needle Exchanges Save Lives but May Imperil Workers:”

Worker drug abuse is “a huge problem,” says Jon Zibbell, the founder of a Massachusetts drug users’ coalition who is now an assistant professor at Skidmore College. “We prevent [overdoses] among our clients,” he says. “So we should try to prevent them among our workers.”

Studies suggest that needle exchanges work. In San Francisco, Chicago and New Mexico, heroin-related deaths dropped after users were taught how to administer an anti-overdose medication to each other. In New York City, the rate of new HIV infections among injection-drug users dropped more than 75% between 1995 and 2002 as the number of clean needles distributed doubled, according to a study by epidemiologists there.

Many needle-exchange programs employ recovering addicts who might not always be as recovering as they say. This is a near-universal tactic in service delivery under the theory that those who can empathize with a person’s struggle are better able to help that person and to provide a positive role model.

* Ever wondered why people can’t give unused airline tickets or frequent flyer miles to you? So did the WSJ, and in “Why Fliers Can’t Donate Unused Tickets” Scott McCartney explains that airlines make a lot of money from unused tickets and would rather make specious security and technical arguments than allow greater customer choice.

* Note to the person who found our site by searching repeatedly for “grant writeting in la.”: you’ve correctly realized that you need help with writeting writing.

* In other search news, someone found us by searching for “should we hire a grant writer?” Being grant writers, our answer is almost always yes, but one can find more on this subject in a tangentially related post on “Why Can’t I Find a Grant Writer? How to Identify and Seize that Illusive Beast.” This subject might also become a post of its own at some point: watch this space for more.

* In still more search news, someone else found us by searching for “free grant writing software.” Software isn’t going to help you: learning how to write, however, will. But there are a number of lovely free and open source pieces of writing software, including AbiWord and OpenOffice.org. In the paid but inexpensive world, I’m fond of the Mac program Mellel.

* Why is the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) giving out money for the Garrett A. Morgan Technology and Transportation Education Program, which is designed “to improve the preparation of students, particularly women and minorities, in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)?” Isn’t that the Department of Education’s job? It’s a good example of a point we occasionally make: just because a federal, state, local, or foundation/corporate giving resource doesn’t appear to fund in your area doesn’t mean they won’t issue an RFP in it anyway.

* If you think running your program is hard, consider the Chiricahua Leopard Frog Conservation project, which “will involve hand removal of frogs and monitoring refuge sites to determine status of the Chiricahua Leopard frog and possible re-invading bullfrogs.” Where do I sign up?

* The New York Times is smart enough to try following federal money to A.I.G., as reported in “Where Taxpayers’ Dollars Go to Die.” They should try the same with federal grant programs.

* State smiling lessons for liquor store employees in Pennsylvania. Good luck! One of the nice parts about moving from Seattle to Tucson was the civilized practice of selling booze in grocery stores, which Washington State lacks.

* One of the very few genuinely intelligent recent articles about the financial mess: The Problem With Flogging A.I.G.:

By week’s end, I was more depressed about the financial crisis than I’ve been since last September. Back then, the issue was the disintegration of the financial system, as the Lehman bankruptcy set off a terrible chain reaction. Now I’m worried that the political response is making the crisis worse. The Obama administration appears to have lost its grip on Congress, while the Treasury Department always seems caught off guard by bad news.

And Congress, with its howls of rage, its chaotic, episodic reaction to the crisis, and its shameless playing to the crowds, is out of control. This week, the body politic ran off the rails.

There are times when anger is cathartic. There are other times when anger makes a bad situation worse. “We need to stop committing economic arson,” Bert Ely, a banking consultant, said to me this week. That is what Congress committed: economic arson.

* Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Dambisa Moyo examines Why Foreign Aid Is Hurting Africa: Money from rich countries has trapped many African nations in a cycle of corruption, slower economic growth and poverty. Cutting off the flow would be far more beneficial. He also wrote the book Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa

* Your eyes might deceive you: Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick asks: “Have the Eyes Had It?
Is our eyewitness identification system sending innocents to jail?” The answer, according to her article, is yes.

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Grants.gov and deadline goofs

Isaac wrote about the dangers of online submissions in “Grants.gov Lurches Into the 21st Century,” which says that real world deadlines should be at least two days before the actual deadline to ensure that your proposal is actually received. This will help you avoid latency and response problems when every other applicant rushes to upload their application at the last minute.

Occasionally Grants.gov goofs result in postings like one regarding the Department of Education’s Charter School Programs (CSP; CFDA 84.282A):

The original notice for the FY 2009 CSP competition established a January 29, 2009, deadline date for eligible applicants to apply for funding under this program. For this competition, applicants are required to submit their applications electronically through the Governmentwide Grants.gov site (www.Grants.gov). Grants.gov experienced a substantial increase in application submissions that resulted in system slowness on the deadline date. For this reason we are reopening and establishing new deadline dates for the FY 2009 competition for CSP. Applicants must refer to the notice inviting applications for new awards that was published in the Federal Register on December 15, 2009 (73 FR 76014) for all other requirements concerning this reopened competition. The new deadline dates are: Deadline for Transmittal of Applications: February 25, 2009.

The odd thing, of course, is that whoever operates Grants.gov must know deadline days will result in a submission flood, and yet when that flood predictably comes everyone seems flummoxed. Sometimes, but not always, the funding agency responds by allowing more time. It’s not apparent what factors, if any, Grants.gov or program personnel consider in deciding whether to extend the deadline, and this opaqueness means that you have to assume that no deadlines will be extended. Isaac wrote about a lucky circumstance in “Now It’s Time for the Rest of the Story:”

[…] our client didn’t even know that HUD had received the proposal until about two weeks before the funding notification. It seems that she did not receive the sequence of emails from grants.gov confirming receipt of the proposal. She called and sent emails to grants.gov and HUD, which generated responses along the lines of, “we can’t find any record of it.”* This went on for about two months. Adding to the festivities, it turned out that there were problems with other applicants that day at grants.gov, so HUD re-opened the competition for a short period of time to allow these applicants to re-submit. Our client called the HUD Program Officer to discuss the re-submission process, at which point she was quickly told, “You don’t have to, we have your proposal and it’s already scored.” Two weeks later, she got a call from her congressman letting her know she’s been funded.

But you can’t rely on lucky circumstances. Just as the stimulus bill probably isn’t going to function as advertised and popularly portrayed and FEMA can’t seem to run the Assistance to Firefighters (AFG) program well, Grants.gov isn’t going to yield the efficiency gains it theoretically should. And if stimulus-funded programs begin pouring forth from Washington, the traffic on Grants.gov is only going to grow.

There’s a lesson to take from this: Grants.gov submissions are as arbitrary and disorganized as paper submissions, but it’s vastly harder to prove that you actually submitted a proposal using Grants.gov. In modern times the postal system and FedEx have rarely—if ever—been so overwhelmed that they couldn’t deliver packages (exceptions being obvious weather issues like hurricanes), and even when they became overwhelmed, one can still show proof of submission. With Grants.gov, that luxury is gone. Be warned.

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FEMA and Grants.gov Together at Last

Last week I complained that FEMA still hadn’t posted the Assistance to Firefighters Grant (AFG) Program 2008 Fire Prevention and Safety Grants to Grants.gov, which particularly rankled after last year’s fiasco.

My post went up on February 1, and lo! on February 2, the FY2008 Fire Prevention and Safety Grants program appeared on Grants.gov. And it only took a single e-mail to FEMA and last year’s contact person, Tom Harrington.

For those of you who are interested, the prodding e-mail I sent said:

Last year, I wrote to Tom Harrington, the AFG contact person, to ask why the AFG RFP didn’t appear in the Federal Register until three days before the deadline. We had an increasingly bizarre exchange about why the delay occurred, in which he gave a wonderfully nebulous response to my pointed questions about who was responsible for posting the announcement to Grants.gov: “I don’t know if there is anyone specific to blame; the process is to blame.” That exchange (see below for the whole thing) became the promised unflattering post on FEMA Tardiness, Grants.gov, and Dealing with Recalcitrant Bureaucrats.

This year, the AFG program RFP was released and, just like last year, didn’t appear in Grants.gov. What gives? Did the policy promised by Tom—”As soon as the policy is written, we’ll know. At this time, there is no policy.”—ever get written? If so, by who? If so, why wasn’t it written? This became the latest post on Grant Writing Confidential—FEMA Fails to Learn New Tricks With the Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program—and I would love to write a follow-up with your response.

As you can see from the About Grants.gov page, the site is supposed to be a central storehouse for grants information:

The concept has its origins in the Federal Financial Assistance Management Improvement Act of 1999, also known as Public Law 106-107. Public Law 106-107 has since sunset and is now known as the Grants Policy Committee (GPC). For more information on the Grants Policy Committee, click here.

The Grants Policy Committee’s Final Implementation Plan includes a policy product on page 6 that says one of its products will be a “policy on use of Grants.gov for mandatory grants” which will “Establish [… a] policy requiring agencies to post a description of funding opportunities for mandatory grants on Grants.gov.” Why is the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA hindering that effort?

This year’s unnamed contact person still hasn’t replied, which hurts my feelings, but at least I’ve inspired change you can believe in.

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FEMA Tardiness, Grants.gov, and Dealing with Recalcitrant Bureaucrats

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—the same guys who brought us the stellar job after Hurricane Katrina—issued the Assistance to Firefighters Grants program on what Grants.gov says is March 26, 2008. But the deadline was April 04, 2008, which is absurdly short by any standards, let alone those of a federal agency. I sent an e-mail to the contact person, Tom Harrington, asking if there was a typo. He responded: “No mistake. The Grants.gov posting was a little delayed. The application period for AFG actually started on March 3rd.” So, unless you have psychic powers, it is unlikely that you would have known about this opportunity. This “little delay” is for a program with $500,000,000 of funding. If anything has changed at FEMA since Katrina, it’s not obvious from my encounter with the organization; as President Bush said to FEMA’s chief after Katrina, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!”

I was curious about how and why this deadline foul-up occurred, leading to an e-mail exchange Tom, who appears to be a master at not knowing about the programs he is a contact person for. It’s instructive to contrast my experience with him and the one with the state officials who I wrote about in Finding and Using Phantom Data. Bureaucrats come in a variety of forms, some helpful, like the ones who provided dental data to the best of their ability, and some not, such as Tom.

I replied to his e-mail and said, “Do you know who was responsible for the delay, or can you find that out? Three weeks is more than a ‘little’ delayed.” He gave me a wonderfully bureaucratic response: “I don’t know if there is anyone specific to blame; the process is to blame.” That’s rather curious, since processes don’t put grant opportunities on Grants.gov—people do, assuming that federal bureaucrats should be considered people. And even if the “process” is to blame, someone specific should to change the process so problems like this one don’t recur. I replied: “If ‘the process is to blame,’ what will you do differently next year to make sure this doesn’t happen again?”

His response contradicted his earlier statement: “Assure that those responsible for the paperwork are informed that they are responsible for the paperwork.” In other words, someone is responsible for this year’s problem—but who is that person? I inquired: “I’m wondering who is responsible for the paperwork or who will be responsible for it.” And Tom responded: “As soon as the policy is written, we’ll know. At this time, there is no policy.” Notice how he didn’t answer my first question: who is responsible? Instead, he used two clever constructions, by saying that “we’ll know,” rather than him or some specific person with FEMA. Instead, some nebulous “we,” with no particular individual attached to the group will know. The passive construction “there is no policy,” avoid specifying a responsible person. Tom uses language to cloak the identity of whoever might be in charge of the FEMA policy regarding Grants.gov. The e-mail exchange went for another fruitless round before I gave up.*

If you were actually interested in finding the truth about who caused the delay, or how it will be avoided next year, you’d have to try and find out who is really in charge of the program, contact that person, and probably continue up the food chain when that person gives you answers similar to Tom’s. Normal people, however, are unlikely to ever try this, which is why Tom’s blame of “the process” is so ingenious: he avoids giving any potential target. Someone caused this problem, and to find out who would probably take an enterprising journalist or an academic highly interested in the issue.**

Sadly, I’m not going to be that person, as I write this chiefly to show a) how bureaucracies work, which isn’t always in the positive way I described in “Finding and Using Phantom Data”, and b) why you should be cognizant of the potential drawbacks of Grants.gov. Regarding the former, if you need to find information from reluctant bureaucrats, you have to be prepared to keep trying to pin them down or become enough of a pest that they or their bosses would rather get rid of you by complying with your request than by stonewalling. If the bureaucrats at the health department from “Finding and Using Phantom Data” had been as unhelpful as Tom, I would’ve begun this process because data is more important than the deadline for this program.

This strange interlude in the Never Never Land of FEMA also tells us something important about Grants.gov: the primary website for notifying interested parties about government grants is as useful as the organizations who use it. Any fire department that depends on Grants.gov for announcements just got screwed. Despite the designation of Grants.gov as “a central storehouse for information on over 1,000 grant programs[…]”, it’s only as good as the independent organizations using it. Perhaps not surprisingly, given FEMA’s past performance, that organization doesn’t appear interested in timeliness. Incidents like this explain Isaac’s wariness and skepticism toward Grants.gov, and why it, like so many government efforts, tends not to live up to its purpose. And when something goes wrong, whether it be FEMA during Hurricane Katrina or propagating information about grant programs, don’t be surprised if “the process is to blame.”

EDIT: You can see our follow-ups to this post in “FEMA Fails to Learn New Tricks With the Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program” and “FEMA and Grants.gov Together at Last.”

* Tolstoy wrote in the appendix to War and Peace (trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky):

In studying an epoch so tragic, so rich in the enormity of its events, and so near to us, of which such a variety of traditions still live, I arrived at the obviousness of the fact that the causes of the historical events that take place are inaccessible to our intelligence. To say […] that the causes of the events of the year twelve are the conquering spirit of Napoleon and the patriotic firmness of the emperor Alexander Pavlovich, is as meaningless to say that the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire are that such-and-such barbarian led his people to the west […] or that an immense mountain that was being leveled came down because the last workman drove his spade into it.

You could say the same of trying to study the manifold tentacles and networks of the federal government, which is only moved, and then only to a limited extent, during a truly monumental and astonishing screw-up like Katrina, which is itself only a manifestation of problems that extend far backwards in time and relate to culture, incentives, and structure, but such failures are only noticed by the body politic at large during disasters.

** Even journalists get tired of fighting the gelatinous blob. As Clive Crook writes in The Atlantic, “Personally, and I speak admittedly as a resident of the District of Columbia, I find the encompassing multi-jurisdictional tyranny of inspectors, officers, auditors, and issuers of licenses—petty bureaucracy in all its teeming proliferation—more oppressive in the United States than in Britain, something I never expected to say.”

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Grants.gov Lurches Into the 21st Century

Change is coming, albeit slowly, to Grants.gov, the the online system for Federal submissions. But, as with all things grants, the change is confusing at best.

When the feds first started transitioning to electronic submissions five or six years ago, different agencies used different approaches, resulting in general chaos. Eventually, Grants.gov became the default gateway. While the concept of Grants.gov isn’t bad (the applicant downloads an “application kit file”, fills out some forms and attaches locally generated files before uploading the whole mess), the reality is cumbersome. This is because until recently Grants.gov exclusively used a creaky program named “PureEdge Viewer,” which does not support Mac OS X, Windows Vista, or Linux and is as easy to use as a nuclear submarine. Using the PureEdge Viewer is like gazing into the world of computing circa 1996, but it more or less works.

One fun aspect of submitting through Grants.gov is that the system generates a total of three emails after upload to confirm the upload process, but gives itself 48 hours to do so. Thus, the real world deadline for Grants.gov submissions is actually two days in advance of the published deadline, since, unless there is a system meltdown, the funding agency is unlikely to give you any slack. So, if the upload gets screwed up, you’re generally screwed as well. And, of course Grants.gov tech support (actually provided by IBM) is closed on weekends, making Monday submissions especially festive. Finally, the Grants.gov tech support people have no knowledge of the funding programs and the program officers at the funding agencies have little if any technical knowledge. This sets up a perfect opportunity for being bounced back and forth between the two, making a call to Grants.gov tech support a virtual guarantee of frustration. Calling Grants.gov is like being in a Mac Guy commercial with two Windows guys and no Mac Guy*.

Now, the good news: for what seems like forever, Grants.gov has been “testing” the PureEdge Viewer replacement, which is Adobe Reader 8.1.2, meaning that the submission system is finally being dragged in the 21st Century. The testing is apparently over and Grants.gov now says: “Applicants are required to have a compatible version of Adobe Reader installed to apply for grant applications.” Sounds good, since Adobe supports Vista, OS X, and Linux, but the euphoria will cease when you look further down the page and find out: “Please note, not all applications are provided in Adobe Reader, so it is recommended to also have the PureEdge Viewer installed.” As usual, the feds givith and the feds taketh away, because not all agencies will use Adobe and we’re in for even more confusion with Grants.gov trying to manage two different systems at once. Every time the feds create a unified standard, they change it later. Call me crazy, but I predict even more chaos, particularly since HUD, a notoriously dysfunctional agency even by federal standards, is the guinea pig and will use Adobe for all SuperNOFA submissions this year.

I remember when HUD first used Grants.gov a few years ago and the process for all of their submissions got mucked up somehow, resulting in extensions and re-submissions for every SuperNOFA program. History could repeat itself, as after 30+ years of working with HUD, I have every confidence in their ability to screw up the submission process. If you’re applying for a HUD grant this year, I recommend uploading at least a week early.

We’ll keep you posted on our experience with the new and perhaps improved Grants.gov system. We still prefer using paper submissions, when allowed, as we know exactly what they will look like on the other end and, furthermore, I am 100% certain that no federal proposals are being reviewed on computer screens (think about the oddball collection of 14″ CRTs likely to be found in the bowels of HUD central and you can assume everything is being printed out at the other end anyway). With a paper submission, you know what you sent and what the agency received. With an electronic submission, you have the ever popular GIGO, “garbage in/garbage out,” problem.

*An aside for those of you who are panting for an obscure movie reference—the first movie role of Justin Long’s, who plays the Mac Guy, was the obsessed young fan in the great Star Trek spoof, Galaxy Quest, with its pearls of wisdom for all grant writers, “Never give up, never surrender!”

HRSA has $51M for FQHCs!

HRSA just issued the “FY 2025 Quality Improvement Fund – Transitions in Care for Justice-Involved Populations (QIF-TJI)” NOFO. This program provides grants to “strengthen transitions in healthcare for persons soon to be released from incarceration” under the Second Chance Act.  There’s $51M available with grants to $1 million over two years. Only FQHCs are eligible applicants, but you must act quickly, as the grants.gov deadline is June 10 and the EHBs deadline is July 2. S + A has written dozens of funded HRSA grants for FHQCs. Call 800.540.8906 ext. 1 or email seliger@seliger.com for a fast free fee quote. We’ll write your entire QIF-TJI proposal or edit your draft for a reasonable flat fee.

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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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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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Links: Peculiar HUD programs, hydrogen energy, breakthrough therapies, and more!

* I spotted an interesting HUD program that covers a topic I’ve never or rarely seen the feds touch: “Increasing the Supply of Affordable Housing through Off-Site Construction and Pro-Housing Reforms Research Grant Program Pre and Full Application.” Four million dollars are available, with grants of $500,000 and five estimated awards. (Five times $500,000 is $2.5 million, not $4 million: feel free to ask HUD about the discrepancy). Still, the “Increasing the Supply of Affordable Housing” offers funding for research to “build the evidence base to accelerate the adoption of effective practices and policies to increase the production and supply of quality, affordable housing.” News that the housing crisis is primarily one of demand may finally be percolating through the federal bureaucracy.

What’s your favorite unusual grant program? Leave a comment with the answer.

* “US could soon approve MDMA therapy — opening an era of psychedelic medicine.” Better late than never. Banning MDMA by making it a Schedule I drug was a mistake when it happened and continues to be a mistake, and one that makes millions of people pay the price of our collective folly. “What MDMA Therapy Did For Me” is a passionate first-person account of using MDMA therapeutically, and it begins: “I did MDMA therapy. It was a deeply profound and life-changing experience.” And then: “I would rank it as one of the top 3 most important things I’ve done in my life, at least in terms of my personal development.” I of course, like you, have never done anything illegal, but “What MDMA Therapy Did For Me” is consistent with my own experiences.

* “I personally named my house and business after Silmarillion references – I would have named my car after one, but I learned my friend had named her car after it first, and that Steven Colbert had also named his car after it, and it would be weird to have all these cars named ‘Vingilótë’ driving around. At this point I backed off.” Would it be weird, or too weird? From “Contra Kriss On Nerds And Hipsters.”

* Rice cookers are great, underrated kitchen gadgets. I use mine (also a Zojirushi, if you’re wondering) all the time. It, combined with an Instant Pot, helps me make a lot of good, interesting food in a relatively short period of time, and without having to constantly check for doneness.

* A supposed breakthrough in stationary storage for hydrogen-nickel batteries. Emphasis on “supposed.” I’m not sure what the “catalyst” is, exactly, as described in the article. We’ve worked on some hydrogen grant projects and are cognizant of the potential benefits (here is us describing the DOE’s Hydrogen Shot grant program), but we’ll see how many breakthroughs materialize that can also be commercialized. Press releases are cheap.

* The great electrician shortage. It’s interesting to see this:

People who graduate from college do earn more, on average, than people who don’t, but the statistics can be misleading. Many young people who start don’t finish, yet still take on tens of thousands in education loans—and those who do graduate often discover that the economic advantage of holding a degree can be negated, for years, by the cost of having acquired it.

Those who skip college frequently do better, and not just at first.

While I’m not sure we’d have seen emphasized in this venue a decade ago, word about the problems of the “college for all” model is spreading. Better late than never. My main essay on this topic is here, from 2017, but it’s still relevant.

* Make parking impossible. We can choose to make the cities we want to live in through effective public policies.

* “How to Stop Environmental Review from Harming the Environment.” The National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) is having the opposite effect of what its creators intended. It often harms, instead of helping, the environment. Maybe we should fix that.

* 2023 geothermal update.

* California strip malls were upzoned last Saturday. The housing crisis is encouraging California politicians to take some relatively modest steps towards improvement, which are welcome, but more can and should be done. Property owners should be able to build whatever they (safely) want to. Don’t believe me? Visit Tokyo and observe the incredibly dense and creative land use planning that allows 36M folks to live in relatively affordable and good housing.

* Related to the link above: Developer could build hundreds, and maybe a thousand, apartments in Beverly Hills. Good. California needs more housing—a topic we’ve covered extensively, particularly because we’ve worked on so many California homelessness services and affordable housing grants—and the sooner California builds more, the sooner it can help get the homeless housed and make life at least somewhat affordable for the middle class. The California dream of inexpensive, sunshine-filled life was alive until NIMBYs brutally murdered it via zoning. Let’s bring it back.

* “Towards an enlightened centrism.” This is often what we aspire to: knowledge, information, understanding, and an avoidance of petty clannishness.

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

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

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

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

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

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