Faithful readers will know that we recently predicted that the Department of Labor (DOL) would soon issue the FY ’15 YouthBuild SGA. The SGA was in fact published February 18. I still don’t know why DOL feels like it has to keep upcoming SGAs secret, unless it’s to make sure that their own staffers don’t have to meet deadlines, but at least they provided about 60 days to respond: the deadline is April 22. $73 million is up for grabs.
While the SGA publication was not much of a surprise, there is an interesting nugget (or “nougat,” as we like to call unusual aspects of RFPs*) in this one with respect to the slice and dice of available funds:
The Department intends to use up to 30 percent of the total available funding for this competition for the award of grants to eligible applicants that have not previously received a DOL YouthBuild grant or have not substantially completed performance on their initial DOL-funded grant award. [. . .] The remainder of [the] funds will be used to award grants to eligible applicants that have been previously funded by the DOL YouthBuild program and have demonstrated success in the program.
There are actually two pots of YouthBuild funds: $51,100,00 or $21,900,000, depending on the type of applicant. This is either good or bad news, based on how you like to handicap your agency’s likelihood of being funded.
Since we’re grant writers, not fortune tellers or racetrack touts, Seliger + Associates does not think much of this sort of handicapping. Our advice when asked this question—which generally happens several times a week—is simple: “If your agency is eligible and you want to run the grant program, apply. You can’t win the Lotto without buying it ticket.”
The above funding split mean that pretty much any otherwise eligible nonprofit or public agency can apply this year,** which is great.
* One other oddity: the SGA says nothing about green jobs, which the DOL has been hammering into applicants’s heads for the last half decade.
** If you read the above SGA quote carefully, you’ll note that the ineligible agencies are the previous YouthBuild grantees that screwed up their grants, somehow, at least in the eyes of the DOL.