This week’s Grant Alert e-mail newsletter has a curious RFP: a single HRSA Service Area Competition (SAC) grant is available to Miami-area nonprofits. You might remember SAC because we wrote “HRSA Service Area Competition (SAC) Grants: How to Defend Your Turf or Deftly Lift a HRSA Grant from an Unsuspecting Grantee” back in June, when the general competition was underway.
The fact that a second competition is being held exclusively for Miami could mean a couple of things:
1. Whoever got the Miami grant screwed it up and had their funding pulled. If so, the local Miami paper should be on this story but probably isn’t.
2. None of the Miami applications were fundable, but for whatever reason HRSA wants to fund Miami.
3. HRSA somehow came up with extra money, perhaps through a Congressional appropriation or earmark, for Miami money.
4. Something even more devious is going on behind the scenes that we’re not aware of.
Of those, number 1 is the most plausible. This also means that Miami-area nonprofits who want to get on the SAC Section 330 bandwagon have an unusual opportunity to do so, because no one is defending that turf at the moment.
The other set of RFPs in this week’s newsletter are three Brownfields programs that should be of special interest to California public agencies and nonprofit affordable housing developers that are interested in developing Brownfields sites. The grants should generate more interest than usual because the California legislature recently eliminated redevelopment agencies, along with tax-increment financing and the 20% set-aside of tax increment funds for affordable housing that was previously required. In this face of this sea change, Brownfields grants have become a much more attractive way of defraying development costs than they were previously.
If you’re part of a city in California, you should be thinking about this RFP.