Search Results for: head start

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Links: Kickstarter for Municipal Projects, Sentence Studies, L.A.’s Transit Revolution, Recess, Homeless Youth, and More!

* Citizenvestor: Kickstarter for Municipal Projects. So if your municipality has public services planned but no way of paying for them, it can see how badly residents really want the service.

* Here’s another silly sentence alert: the NSF’s Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers” program says that it supports “the research and development of innovative models for engaging K-12 students in authentic experiences that build their capacity to participate in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and information and communications technology (ICT) workforce of the future.” How many grant programs are designed to support inauthentic experiences? And what’s the difference between an “authentic” experience and an experience that isn’t? (I’m also guessing the writers haven’t read Andrew Potter’s The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves.)

* Terrifying Teen Speech in the News Again: What kind of democracy teaches its young people they’ll be punished for talking out of turn?

* One of my favorite federal programs has just returned for another round: “Grants to Manufacturers of Certain Worsted Wool Fabrics.” There’s $5 million available. If there are any manufacturers of certain worsted wool fabrics among our readership, please, give us a call at 800.540.8906. (Even weirder than the program itself is the sub-agency administering the grant: the Administration for Children and Families. What do worsted wool fabrics have to do with children and families?)

* L.A.’s Transit Revolution: How a ballot initiative, a visionary mayor, and a quest for growth are turning Los Angeles into America’s next great mass-transit city.

* The Grant Program I’d Love to See, from “Confessions of a Community College Dean.”

* Someone found us by searching for “how hard is it to become a grant writer.” The short answer is “very.” The longer answer can be found in many posts on this blog (here is a decent place to start), and the answer also depends on the existing writing skills and nonprofit / government knowledge of the person asking the question.

* Sex? Not my kid! A new book explores parental delusions about their teens’ sexuality. Notice this: “[S]exual threats are seen [by parents] as ever present — from someone else’s sex-crazed kid, someone else’s corruptive parental influence, someone else’s perversion. Rarely do parents attribute the risk to their own child’s sexual desire or agency. Surprise, surprise.”

* “Low Transfer of Learning: The Glass Is Half Full,” which ends with this: “Instead of bemoaning American workers’ mediocre literacy and numeracy, we should be grateful that millions of Americans who learn little in school still manage to learn useful trades on the job. Seriously.”

* What OxyContin Addicts in West Virginia Tell Us About the War on Drugs, which substance abuse treatment providers probably already know.

* Someone called us and wanted to know about grants for a faith-based restaurant that was structured as a business. We were perplexed: what’s a faith-based restaurant? Does that mean the food is likely to be better or worse than a standard restaurant? Regardless, we were confused, because we’ve never heard of a faith-based restaurant before.

* The Rebirth of Recess: How do you introduce recess to kids who have never left the classroom?

* Survey: 75% of Homeless Youth Use at Least One Social Network.

* Personal poverty coaches?

* “The Brooklyn bookshop saving out-of-print sci-fi, one e-book at a time: The genre enthusiasts are working with rights holders to preserve great books.”

* Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok announce Marginal Revolution University. I admire the spirit of the enterprise but am somewhat skeptical of its likely impact.

* How To Win The War On Poverty: Recognize That Redistribution Works:

… while the poverty rate has barely declined over the past 45 years according to official measures, that’s because the official measure—which looks at pre-tax pre-transfer income—by definition rules out the beneficial impact of most public policy solutions. If you look at income after taxes and transfers you see that the shape of American public policy has become much friendlier to the poor during this period. If you look at consumption measures—which can help capture the value of the in-kind provision of services—there’s even more improvement.

* “Hard Unemployment Truths About ‘Soft’ Skills: Finding qualified applicants for high-tech jobs would be great. So would finding someone who can answer the phone.” I am somewhat skeptical about these stories for a number of reasons: they involve dubious statistics from self-interested trade groups (“Manpower Group’s 2012 Talent Shortage Survey” or “A survey in April of human-resources professionals conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management”), and none of the “representatives from major American manufacturing companies” quoted in the article are saying what they’re paying. “What exactly are the skills you can’t find?” usually means, “What are the skills you can’t find at a given price?” I would love to find an expert masseuse for $12 / hour, but guess what? I can’t, and neither can anyone else, because that’s not the market-clearing price.

* What Does it Mean to Be Poor?: The consumption of the poor is much higher than their incomes. Is poverty falling, or not? The answer is often, “It depends and how you measure and what you’re measuring.” In material terms—which the right likes to focus on—the poor are arguably doing better than ever. In health, public safety, and living experience terms—which the left likes to focus on—the poor are doing pretty poorly. This is also more of a class than income-based issue, despite me using income signifiers / descriptors her.

* Life Expectancy Shrinks for Less-Educated Whites in U.S.. Compare this to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart; The State of White America, 1960–2010 See also Intangible Dividend of Antipoverty Effort: Happiness.

* Writing Rules! Advice From The Times on Writing Well.

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First 5 LA Issues a Huge RFP for Homeless Services, and Nimble Nonprofits Start Hopping (Or Hoping)

Los Angeles County nonprofits have a unique opportunity to nibble on some fresh grant lettuce, because First 5 L.A.* just issued a NOFA for the Supportive Housing for Homeless Families Fund. There is $23,000,000 available to provide housing and supportive services for families that are homeless or at-risk of homelessness, that have had involvement with the child welfare system, and that include children aged prenatal to 5 years in Los Angeles County. This is a ton of money for a local funding cycle, and the announcement illustrates that, despite rumors to the contrary, there are many sources of funding available if you keep your ears up and your eye on the prize. If you’re a LA nonprofit even vaguely interested in homeless services, hop over to the mandatory bidder’s conference and nose around. I think you’ll find this to be a pretty tasty NOFA.

Since the advent of the seemingly endless Great Recession, we’ve written several posts about how important it is for nonprofits to stay nimble—including “Time Banks, Barter, Community Gardens and More: Economic Misery Provides Opportunities for Nimble Nonprofits” and “Repurpose: The Word of the Decade and a Word for Nonprofits to Live By.” The close presidential election and the potential cutbacks in federal funding posed by the looming fiscal cliff should also have most nonprofits hopping around like bunnies, as they are hoping for new income streams.

* Each of California’s 58 counties has a First 5 agency that distributes grant funds derived from the 50 cent special tax on cigarettes (Proposition 82), which was championed by Meathead, AKA Rob Reiner a few years ago. Since all California counties have this funding stream, if you’re a CA nonprofit that provides early childhood services, go to your First 5 agency and take a dip.

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Surfs Up: Seliger + Associates Is Back Where We Started From (More or Less): California

A guilty pleasure during the mid-2000s was watching The O.C. with our then-high-school-age twins. Between the typical nighttime soap opera plot twists, the series produced occasional insights, had appealing actors and perpetuated the “endless summer” mythology of Southern California that we mine with good effect in counterpoint when writing needs assessments for LA-area clients. But best of all were the indie rock songs, and best of these was the theme, “California.” From an aerial position, the camera pans over incredible Newport Beach bluff-top houses during the opening credits as one-hit wonders Phantom Planet cries:

We’ve been on the run
Driving in the sun
Looking out for #1
California here we come
Right back where we started from.

After leaving California on the day of O. J. Simpson’s slow speed-speed chase in 1994, Seliger + Associates has come right back where we started from. Well, not exactly—it’s Huntington Beach in SoCal, not Danville in NoCal, but close enough. Faithful readers will know that we and our business have migrated over the years from NoCal to Seattle to Tucson to Surf City.

When I was at Sandburg Junior High in Golden Valley, a beach-deprived suburb of Minneapolis, I was a big fan of the Beach Boys. I was even bigger fan of Jan and Dean, who recorded Surf City. To paraphrase Brian Wilson, who wrote the lyrics, now that we’ve gone to Surf City, we hope it’s “two grants for every client.”

Faithful readers will also know that when I travel by car, I observe the passing scenes of Americana with a grant writer’s eye. This relatively short move confirms that, like Mark Twain, the rumors of the death of the Great Recession are greatly exaggerated. As I did when I drove from Seattle to Tucson two years ago, I saw many signs of economic dislocation on my way to Surf City a few weeks ago—vacant and abandoned buildings and folks in broken down cars at rest areas that evoke the the Joads, although it was hard to say whether they were fleeing from or to California. Even in LaLa Land, it is obvious from empty retail and office space, car lots with few vehicles and fewer shoppers, $1 meal deals, and a dearth of help wanted signs that good times have not arrived outside the precincts of the New York Times and Federal Reserve spokespeople.

Bad economic news is, of course, good news for grant writers, as I’ve been blogging about for the last three years. Seliger + Associates has been busy churning out proposals, which is the primary reason readers have not seen a post from me for a few weeks. Now the move is more or less complete, and we’ve just about caught up with deadline obligations. I will get back to writing at least a post every two weeks or so.

There is lots of interesting news that impacts grant writers and grant seekers. Perhaps the most important is the incredible number of RFPs on the street, which will be true throughout the summer, and the reality that Congress will significantly decrease discretionary spending for FY ’12 as part of a debt ceiling deal with the Obama administration. I’ve written about the former repeatedly in recent months and will write about the latter soon. But, now, I think it’s time to power down the iMac, leave the office, go home, put on my baggies, and take the puppy to the Huntington Dog Beach, easily the best dog beach in the world, to see if the Surf’s Up:

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Seliger + Associates Hitches Up the Wagons and Heads Out to Where the Pavement Turns to Sand

We’ve more or less completed our move to sunnier climes in Tucson, AZ. This is the fourth location for Seliger + Associates in 16 and a half years in business, starting in Danville, CA, before migrating to Bellevue and then Mill Creek, WA. So it’s goodbye to coffee and mold and hello to incredible Sonoran food and unlimited mountain/desert vistas. As Neil Young said in Thresher:

It was then I knew I’d had enough,
Burned my credit card for fuel
Headed out to where the pavement turns to sand

Faithful readers will remember that whenever I go on a road trip, a blog post integrating grant writing and my innate desire to see what is around the next curve follows. In preparation for the 1,700 mile drive, I read William Least Heat-Moon’s latest book-length paean to the American thirst for the open road, Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (see Blue Highways: Reflections of a Grant Writer Retracing His Steps 35 Years Later for earlier thoughts on Least Heat-Moon’s Ur-travel essay Blue Highways).

Although we had planned to drive south on US Highways 95/395 through Oregon and California, an excellent blue highway route, our mover decided to drive like the World War II Red Ball Express down US 93 from Twin Falls, ID to Tucson—another great blue highway. He is better at his job than we are at his, so he was going to arrive before us, leaving us to the tender mercies of I-5. But all was not lost, as we were able to take CA 58 east from Bakersfield over the Tehachapis through the Mojave Desert, where we found our long lost US 95, going from Needles to Blythe on 100 miles of roller coaster two-lane highway before our own race to Tucson on I-10 through Tonopah, AZ. Least Heat-Moon would be proud. The upshot of this rambling paragraph is that, 35 years after seeing Lowell George and Little Feat perform for the birthday party of a minor LA celebrity a friend of mine knew at the celebrity’s Malibu “ranch” in 1974, I finally got to drive from Tehachapi to Tonopah, as immortalized in Little Feat’s Willin’:

I’ve been from Tuscon to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
Driven every kind of rig that’s ever been made
Driven the back roads so I wouldn’t get weighed
And if you give me: weed, whites, and wine
and you show me a sign
I’ll be willin’, to be movin’*

I only need to find time to drive from Tucson to Tucumcari for the circle to be complete.

This blather does have something to do with grant writing: as I have observed before, at their most basic level, grant writers are simply story tellers who often tell stories about places they have never seen. Long distance driving, preferably on blue highways, is an exceptional way to stay in touch with America—not the America of CNN or Fox News or the New York Times and Washington Post, but the America that is really being blasted by the Great Recession. As we rolled through small towns in the Central Valley and Mojave Desert, we saw endless Main Street desolation: forlorn vacant restaurants with fading “For Sale” signs, car dealers, either closed or with the few cars they had spread out across expanses of display lots with balloons tied to antennas in a sad attempt at normalcy, and, perhaps most troubling, piles of broken stuff—cars, appliances, farm equipment and mounds of unidentifiable crapola that apparently no one wants.

Perhaps no one cares enough to haul this junk away, or maybe there is no place to haul it to. Although politicians from Washington D.C. to Seattle chatter on about the “greening” of American and the importance of using resources wisely, to me it seems more like the “rusting” of America. Least Heat-Moon found the same disturbing panorama in Roads to Quoz, preventing him from seeing the scenery beyond the roadway:

Miles of abandoned buildings, of decaying house-trailers steadily vanishing under agglomerations of cast-off appliances, toys, rusted vehicles (autos, busses, riding mowers, tractors, trucks, a bulldozer, a crane, a forklift), and a plethora of cheap things.

Least Heat-Moon wrote about Oklahoma, which I discussed in the “Blue Highways” post noted above, but the junkification of rural America has worsened considerably in the last year, presumably because of the enervating effects of the recession. If any interested rural nonprofits are reading this, Project JUNC (Joint Undertaking to Negate Crap) would be a great Stimulus Bill grant concept; JUNC would train unemployed folks to pick up stuff, haul it, sort it, and recycle it. I’ll even provide a 20% discount to write the proposal because, like Least Heat-Moon, it’s hard to admire a 19th Century courthouse or church when you have to look past blocks of detritus. It pains me to see much of rural America being buried in kipple.**

I am about to write a HUD Neighborhood Stabilization Program 2 (NSP) proposal for a rural city in California, which involves rehab of vacant, foreclosed houses. Since endless newspaper stories describe how vacant houses get stripped of copper plumbing, appliances, etc., I was going to include this idea, as I usually do when writing about housing rehab, in the proposal. But my recent sojourn through rural OR, CA and AZ, gives me pause. Why would anyone bother breaking into a house to steal metal, when tons of metal are piled along rural roadways, there for the picking? This is a real world demonstration of how road trips benefit grant writers. Grant writer readers should get out of your Aerons, fire up your Prius (in my case, a BMW ragtop), and unleash your inner Kerouac by going On the Road.

* Not to worry: no weed or whites were abused on this drive—just a little wine to take the edge off after the the day’s drive after finding a motel that would take our golden retriever.

** Kipple is the accumulated junk of modern society and is best described by Philip K. Dick (one of my favorite SF writers) in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was made into the nearly perfect 1982 movie, Blade Runner. For cognoscenti of this film, Harrison Ford’s despairing Deckard is actually a replicant.

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The effects of early childhood education programs don’t look good: a large, randomized pre-kindergarten study

There’s a large, new study out on the “Effects of a statewide pre-kindergarten program on children’s achievement and behavior through sixth grade,” and it’s important and unusual because of its results: it finds that pre-k education doesn’t help later educational or behavioral achievement and, if anything, hurts later student achievement. This study is also significant due to its comprehensiveness; the study follows 3,000 kids, who appear to be randomly assigned to pre-k services or not, and the study follows those kids for a long period of time—at least seven years, it seems, and possibly longer. I’ve not got the full manuscript yet but am seeking a copy. Most education studies are observational, in that they observe two or more cohorts, but they don’t use randomized controls, like this one does, and observational studies are particularly prone to bias. The new study is also pre-registered—that is, the authors say what they’re looking for, what success looks like, and how they’re going to measure success before they get their data. There’s a “replication crisis” in social science and medicine, because it’s possible to torture a positive result out of all sorts of data, and this study avoids most if not all of the common pitfalls.

The study’s abstract says:

Data through sixth grade from state education records showed that the children randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children, with the strongest negative effects in sixth grade. A negative effect was also found for disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention

Wow: that’s counter to the intuition of most people, politicians involved in early childhood education, and “common wisdom.” The study is not the last word—no study is—but it is persuasive. For most practitioners, this won’t be immediately relevant, because Head Start and Pre-K For All aren’t likely to see real changes in the near term. But we may see the political winds change over time.

This post is not a policy recommendation: as grant writers, we don’t do policy recommendations, although I do think a lot of students are in college who’d be better served by alternatives, and yet society as a whole hasn’t yet figured that out or properly grokked it, even as total student loans owed passes $1 trillion. But, if America wants to do some form of daycare for all (“universal daycare”), as is proposed in the stalled Build Back Better legislation, that’s a fine goal and we should call it that, instead of pretending it’s possible to have academic, “educational” experiences for the vast majority of kids under the age of five. Four-year olds are not falling “behind,” because, except in the case of unusual prodigies, there is nowhere to fall behind. If anything, excess regimentation and premature optimization are likely to be bigger problems than “falling behind.”

I’ve long been somewhat suspect of early childhood “education”—not from studies per se, but from being around small children. Most don’t have the executive function to do much in the way of what might be called “education.” Trying to create “education” in the sense that we see with older kids or adults seems improbable for very young children. The veneer of “education” using “curriculums” like “The Creative Curriculum” and “The Creative Curriculum GOLD” that we cite in grant proposals seems faintly ridiculous; whether or not a four-year old can identify different kinds of leaves or songs or animals by name doesn’t seem to indicate how that four-year old will do in middle or high school, or college. But there’s a lot of social and economic anxiety around class, economic achievement, and housing; we’ve collectively adopted policies focused on creating scarcity, not abundance, and that’s resulted in intense, and probably pointlessly intense, competition in many fields.

Trying to indoctrinate small children into social, academic, and economic competition culture seems difficult to me, and yet that’s been one response to scarcity policies. Making early childhood teachers, who are really more like caregivers in the classroom, have degrees or advanced degrees seems like a way of raising the cost of childcare without providing much in benefits; everyday human experience seems to be sufficient for taking care of small kids. Maybe small kids are learning cultural markers and such in the early early childhood education setting that will help them later, but, if so, that later help isn’t showing up in the data. There’s a lot of desire to make education a panacea for various kinds of social and economic inequality, but that desire keeps running up against uncomfortable ideas (I won’t call them “truths,” although some might).

Head Start was launched in 1965 as on the initial programs in President Johnson’s “War on Poverty;” if there’s been a large boost in real educational attainment (which is different from “degrees achieved”), I’ve not seen it. I’ve been teaching college undergrads since 2008, and in that time my anecdotal impression is that smartphones and social media have been net bad for learning, noting however that some people do leverage Internet technologies to learn more and faster than they could without. Anecdotes are not data, but, since the late ’90s and early ’00s, we here at Seliger + Associates Grant Writing have been writing proposals for programs like the 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC), and in that time we’ve not seen learning substantially improve from the dissemination of computers and the Internet. In 2013, I wrote a post about a pair of studies finding that computer access appears, if anything, to lower educational attainment. In 2015, I wrote about Kentaro Toyama’s book Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology. “Computers in education” is not the same thing, obviously, as early childhood education, but both are attempts at improving education and life outcomes that are popular but may not be efficacious. If you work in the education industry with students ages 10 or higher—ages old enough for smart phones to have penetrated the population—ask those around you to look at their Apple “Screen Time” app or Android “Digital Wellbeing” controls. Those show how many minutes or hours a day a smartphone is being used, and what a person is doing on that phone. From what I’ve observed, very few people are using the book apps, the Duolingo systems for language learning, or Anki for space-repetition learning. Ask around, see what you find. Think about what that might mean.

Real education is hard. I’ve tried to impart some to students. Probably it’s always been hard and always will be. We should collectively try to do better while also understanding what might be limited, what might be futile, and what might be counterproductive. I’m struck by, at the college level, how little time is spent trying to learn how to teach more effectively, and friends who teach in K – 12 often report the same.

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

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

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

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

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New combo COVID-19 stimulus bill and budget bill have tons of grant “ornaments”

The latest COVID-19 Stimulus Bill was signed into law Dec. 27, which, combined with the FY ’21 budget authorization bill, represents a burst of new grant activity. Congress loves to cobble together fantastically complex budget legislation, as this practice, called adding special interest “ornaments,” gives members lots of room for plausible deniability about voting for them; some of the new discretionary provisions include:

    • $82B for “education,” including $54B for K-12 schools and $23B for colleges/universities. Some of these funds will be distributed on a formula basis, likely via pass-throughs to state education agencies, but the rest should be awarded through competitive RFPs, either direct federal applications or RFPs run by the states.
    • $7B for expanding access to “high-speed internet connections,” including subsidies for low-income families. This provision also include $300M for building out broadband infrastructure in rural areas and $1B for tribal broadband programs. We wrote many broadband infrastructure grants following the 2009 Stimulus Bill during the Great Recession.
    • $70B for a slew of “public health measures,” including $20B for “test and trace” programs and “billions for combating the disparities facing communities of color.” This is another way of saying “walking around money” for nonprofits and local public agencies.
    • $10B for child care providers. We write many early childhood education proposals, including Head Start, Early Head Start, Universal Pre-K, etc., and this set of funding provisions will likely be similar. Furthermore, it’s probable that both non-profit and for-profit entities will be eligible, since much of the non-Head Start child care industry is operated by for-profits.
    • $35B for “wind, solar, and other clean energy projects.” These funds will likely be distributed through the Department of Energy, ARPA-E and similar funding agencies.
    • $400M for food banks and $175M for nutrition programs under the Older Americans Act, which will probably be distributed via programs like Meals on Wheels.
    • $5B for the “entertainment industry,” including cultural institutions like theater groups, museums, etc.
    • $14B for public transit.

Some of the other features, listed here more for amusement than anything else, include: a statement of policy regarding the succession or reincarnation of the Dalai Lama; the establishment of two new Smithsonian museums; giving West Virginia a national park; banning the USPS from mailing electronic vaping products; the decriminalization of various minor violations, including the transportation of water hyacinths, alligator grass, or water chestnut plants across state lines and the unauthorized use of the Swiss coat of arms, the 4-H Club emblem, the “Smokey Bear” character or name, the “Woodsy Owl” character, name or slogan, or “The Golden Eagle Insignia; the establishment of an anti-doping program for horse racing; a bunch of foreign aid programs for things like gender studies in Pakistan; and, my personal favorite, a 180-day countdown underway for the Pentagon and spy agencies to reveal what they all know about UFOs.

In other words, the Mulder and Scully Act of 2020” is hidden in this bill. During a conversation with Tyler Cowen, former CIA director John Brennan recently commented on UFOs, saying that he’s “seen some of those videos from Navy pilots, and I must tell you that they are quite eyebrow-raising” and that, after sifting the evidence, “I think some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”

We’ll write another follow-up post or two on this topic, as the 6,000 page bill is fully digested.

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COVID-19, donations, and foundation and government grant proposals

We’ve been in business since 1994 and have written proposals during several economic shocks; in the Great Recession in 2009, donations to nonprofits began drying up as soon as the stock market began diving (we wrote as much at the time). A decade later, COVID-19 is sending the economy into what could be a second Great Depression. While hopefully the crash will be v-shaped, there’s no way to know when a rebound will start, since much depends on the public’s response and on the success or failure of the drugs in clinical trials.

Nonprofits, and especially human services providers, are being torn between higher service demands and evaporating revenue. Particularly hard hit are Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs); about 1,400 FQHCs deliver front line healthcare to Medicaid and other low-income patients. Total patient population estimates differ, but FQHCs may serve as many as 30 million people. FQHC CEOs have been telling us they have very limited capacity for treating infectious disease patients (no separate waiting rooms, scarce protective gear, etc.) and face staffing shortages, because clinicians staying home to watch their now out-of-school children. Some clinicians are pregnant and some are sick themselves. Inadequate testing infrastructure has been well-covered in the media by now.

Some nonprofits, like Head Start and other early childhood education providers or behavioral health service providers, face the same grim reality, as their centers are closed and third-party payments become delayed or non-existent. For other nonprofits that depend on donations, fundraisers, and/or membership dues (e.g., Boys and Girls Clubs, YMCAs, museums, performing arts, etc.) are likely even worse off. John Macintosh just wrote in the NYT that COVID-19 could mean extinction for many nonprofits. But this extinction can be averted—and will be by nimble nonprofits.

For the short term, nonprofits should stop or reduce screaming empty bowl-in-hand emails and mailers for donations. With the stock market in free-fall and unemployment probably already 10% and on a path to 20% *barring a sudden drug trial that works), seeking donations is delusional. When businesses, small and large, suddenly have zero revenue, millions are being laid off, and 401Ks being decimated, donations will quickly decline, no matter how good the cause or the relationship with the donor. Also, there’ll be no galas, art auctions, and other fundraisers for who knows how long.

The only real option for most nonprofits is to quickly ramp-up grant seeking and grant writing. As has been the case in previous economic crises, the federal response will likely be to dump money into grant programs and issue RFPs. In addition to already authorized FY ’20 federal funding for grant programs, by this week Congress will have passed three huge COVID-19 stimulus bills totally close to $2 trillion—dwarfing the 2009 Stimulus Bill. These bills will have a lot extra money for existing programs, as well as for a flock of new grant programs.* We saw this in 2009, when we wrote proposals for all kinds of oddball programs and projects, and this will unfold again with astonishing speed. Federal agencies will approve grant proposals much faster than usual—like most Americans, the federal bureaucracy rises from its normal stupor to meet extreme challenges. But RFPs are likely to have very short deadlines. Nonprofits that start preparing for intense grant writing will be more likely to succeed.

Most foundations, meanwhile, respond to crises like this by quickly increasing the amount of funds available from their endowments and speeding up their normal approval processes, both to address issues related to the crisis, as well as to keep essential nonprofits operating. In addition to emergency operating support, foundations will be very interested in project concepts relating to primary care access, public health education and outreach, telehealth, and behavioral health. But this foundation response won’t last more than about six months. At some point, they’ll turn off the spigot, either because their endowments will have been depleted too much or the crisis will have passed.

Even nonprofit royalty, which usually don’t sully their hands will grant writing, unless the grants are wired, know that reality has changed.** You may have read, “Met Museum Prepares for $100 Million Loss and Closure Till July.” The author reports that the Met will be “fundraising from foundations and pursuing government grants.” If the Met is turning to grant writing, so should your nonprofit and the sooner the better.

Want to talk about how Seliger + Associates can help? Give us a call at 800.540.8906 ext.1. By the time you read this, your organization’s leadership will probably already be convening meetings about what to do next.

* Extraneous program authorizations in federal spending bills are common and referred to as “ornaments.”

** As Bob Dylan put it in Things Have Changed, “People are crazy and times have changed.”

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Links: Opioids treatment, unglamorous but important bureaucracy, Pre-K for All, and more!

* “‘Pure incompetence:’ As fatal heroin overdoses exploded in black neighborhoods, D.C. officials ignored life-saving strategies and misspent millions of federal grant dollars. More than 800 deaths later, the city is still reckoning with the damage it failed to prevent.” If your organization is working on the opioid crisis, you should give us a call, because there’s a huge amount of federal, state, and local funding for it. Rural areas are seeing and especially large burst of funding.

* “The Tragedy of Germany’s Energy Experiment: The country is moving beyond nuclear power. But at what cost?”

* America’s National Climate Strategy Starts with NEPA. Unglamorous but important.

* Officials want to clear a mile-long homeless camp on a Sonoma County bike trail. Some don’t want to go. We’re guessing that those who don’t want it to go also don’t use the bike trail or live near it.

* The hottest new thing in sustainable building is, uh, wood. If you’re doing construction-related job training, mention cross-laminated timber (CLT) in your next proposal.

* On the Chinese education system and philosophy. It’s nearly the opposite of what programs like Pre-K For All or Early Head Start attempt to do. I wonder how well it works, although that will be hard to say, since it probably takes 40 or 50 years to properly evaluate how an early childhood education program “works,” by which point the entire cultural, social, and technological environment will have changed.

* For another perspective, read me on Bringing Up Bébé, an essay that is sure to be of interest to anyone providing early childhood education services like Pre-K For All or Head Start. We collectively ought to spend more time looking at early childhood from a cross-cultural perspective and less time on making early childhood “academic.” Life is not a race. France and China seem different in key ways but surprisingly similar in some.

* “Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy.” Donations by rich people are better than not, and criticism is misguided. Foundations offer flexibility that government funding typically does not.

* “Let’s quit fetishizing the single-family home.” This would also make programs like YouthBuild work more effectively: zoning restrictions are now one of the biggest problems with any job-training program that includes a construction training element. Many of today’s challenges are really housing and healthcare policy challenges, with powerful incumbents blocking change and the powerful need for change building up.

* “The Age of Decadence: Cut the drama. The real story of the West in the 21st century is one of stalemate and stagnation.” An interesting thesis, but not necessarily one that I buy.

* Was the nuclear family a mistake?.

* How we write scientific and technical grants.

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Do “child-care deserts” highlighted in the Washington Post really exist?

The Washington Post says, “A Minnesota community wants to fix its child-care crisis. It’s harder than it imagined.” Duluth City Councilperson Arik Forsman wants to solve the “region’s child-care crisis” and the reporter, Robert Samuels, vaguely cites “studies [that] have shown… more than half of the country lives in a child-care desert — places where there is a yawning gap between the number of slots needed for children and the number of existing spaces at child-care centers.” The link in his story leads to the highly partisan Center for American Progress website, which defines a child-care desert crisis using cherry-picked data to fit this definition: “any census tract with more than 50 children under age 5 that contains either no child care providers or so few options that there are more than three times as many children as licensed child care slots.”

Numerous rural census tracks are likely not to have any child-care providers, due to vast travel distances and low population density, but could still meet the low bar of 50 young children. The second part of the definition presupposes that most parents want to place their child in child-care, ignoring the reality that there still lots of people who don’t want their child in institutionalized child-care—they have one parent who stays home or who works at home (like I did when my kids, and S + A, were young). Some parents prefer to use family and friend networks. The cost of providing child-cage to infants and toddlers is very high—imagine trying to care for 30 kids, who are not potty-trained, and go on from there.

The “crisis” is based on specious data collected to make a political point, not address the actual issues. I know because we write lots of Head Start, Pre-K For All, and similar proposals under the umbrella of “early childhood education,” which is the theme for almost all child-care grant programs. Head Start is by far the largest publicly-funded early childhood education program and emphasizes “education.” Government funders always insist that child-care providers, including Early Head Start (birth – 3), focus on “education” rather than the custodial care model that largely disappeared 30 years ago. It officially disappeared; in reality, most children under age five are mentally equipped for play far more than they are for educational activities. Still, when we write a child-care/early childhood education proposal, we always state that the program will use the ever-popular “TeachingStratgies Creative Curriculum.” In this curriculum, even very young children are supposedly taught things like “pre-reading” (whatever that is) and other quasi-academic subjects. The typical “class schedule” for child-care programs, however, includes maybe two out of eight hours in alleged academic activities, with the rest of the day devoted to things like welcome and closing circles, snacks and lunch, hand-washing, nap time, outdoor/indoor play, etc.

Many contributing factors that come together to limit child-care options: just like with the affordable housing/homelessness crisis, much of the shortage of child-care slots is due to basic zoning rules (a topic we have covered extensively), as well as strict licensing requirements. In the abstract, most people support the idea of convenient child-care—until an actual facility is proposed down the street, and then existing residents think about 60 frisky kids whooping it up on their block, with fleets of parents dropping-off and picking-up kids. This type of proposal brings out the NIMBYs in force. They will use zoning to fight this “blighting” influence—and will usually win.

Also, ever since the hysteria over the fake McMartin Preschool abuse scandal in 1983, child-care facility regulations, even for home-based child-care, have become very stringent. While likely a good thing overall, this drives up the cost of operating child-care facilities. Even Head Start programs, which are fully federally-funded, have a hard time opening new facilities and keeping them open. All child-care programs, whether for-profit or non-profit, operate on thin margins and can be sunk by regulatory problems.

Then, there’s the challenge of finding and keeping “teachers.” Since Head Start was created in 1965, the open secret has been that it’s as much of a jobs program as an early childhood eduction program. The teachers, who might have a certificate of some sort but are rarely licensed teachers, are often the same moms who put their kids in the program, creating a sort of closed-loop system.

This worked fairly well until a perfect storm recently hit. As we wrote about in early 2019 “The movement towards a $15 minimum hourly wage and the Pre-K For All program in NYC,” this effort spells trouble for all child-care programs—the Minnesota minimum wage rises to $10/hour on January 1, 2020 and is set to rise to $15/hour by 2022. Staff costs make up the vast majority of child-care program budgets and rapidly rising minimum wages mean higher fees for parents, and they require larger public subsidies (which are not available in most municipalities). Ergo, it’s much harder to open a child-care facility and keep it open, even if qualified staff can be found. With an unemployment rate of less than 4% in the Duluth area, good staff are hard to find.

In related news, “Government Standards Are Making 5-Year-Olds and Kindergarten Teachers Miserable.” It seems that the bureaucrats who make these decisions have never interacted with actual human five-year-olds.

Nonetheless, we’re delighted to add the concept of child-care deserts to the equally ephemeral “food deserts” concept we often use in proposals. In grant writing, it’s not possible to have too many Potemkin deserts to add color to otherwise drab needs assessments. And many funders are more excited about solving marginal problems than real ones, like regulatory overreach and zoning.