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The end of SAMHSA’s “waivered prescriber” MAT requirement: a grant writer’s farewell

You could easily have missed it: in January, SAMHSA ended its waivered-prescriber requirement due to an obscure section of the recently passed Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill (BIL). Those of you who aren’t involved in the minutia of healthcare service provision and medication-assisted treatment (MAT) may read the preceding sentence and think: “What’s that about, and why does it matter?”* Until this year, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) required that doctors and nurse practitioners (NPs) / physicians assistants (PAs) who prescribe buprenorphine—the key medication used to treat persons with what SAMHSA and HRSA like to call “opioid use disorder” (OUD)—get a special DEA waiver. This “waivered prescriber” requirement had the effect of severely limiting the number of doctors and other healthcare providers who could offer MAT. So you’d have situations where a doctor could prescribe potentially addictive opioid painkillers like oxycodone, but not the buprenorphine that is used to treat OUD. Welcome to the upside-down world of American healthcare.

This waivered-prescriber process always seemed baffling, and it turns out that I’m not the only person who wondered about what’s so special about Suboxone and similar drugs: back in 2015, for example, Scott Alexander wrote that any doctor should be able to prescribe it, and he observed that Suboxone, the “(generally safe) treatment for addiction[,] is more highly regulated than the (very dangerous) addictive drugs it is supposed to replace.” MAT works way better than non-medication efforts, although not perfectly.

Dr. Alexander** notes that:

Suboxone treatment isn’t perfect, and relapse is still a big problem, but it’s a heck of a lot better than most rehabs. Suboxone gives people their dose of opiate and mostly removes the biological half of addiction” and that “Some people stay on Suboxone forever and do just fine – it has few side effects and doesn’t interfere with functioning. Other people stay on it until they reach a point in their lives when they feel ready to come off, then taper down slowly under medical supervision, often with good success.

So maybe taking a daily dose of Suboxone isn’t ideal, but it’s a big improvement on OUD. How many people reading this have a daily dose of coffee, tea, Yerba Mate, or some other caffeinated substance? Sure, we can say that tea makes us more productive, but, compared with street and prescribed opioids, doesn’t Suboxone?

Probably the “waivered-prescriber” thing should have ended much sooner—but that’s far from the DEA or FDA’s most egregious blunder in recent times. Studies find that “FDA Deregulation Increases Safety and Innovation and Reduces Prices.” Maybe we should collectively think more seriously as a society about the costs of government paternalism. The supplement industry, while not exactly a shining star of excellence, works okay without the FDA. People who find FDA approval valuable could choose to only buy substances with FDA approval; those who are FDA skeptics could choose not to. Most supplement buyers don’t appear to care about FDA proof.

In the meantime, regarding OUD and MAT, sudden deaths from fentanyl remain high in NYC—and fentanyl is often accidentally or intentionally mixed with non-opioid drugs like cocaine. This could be a legalization or decriminalization argument: black-market items rarely follow Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP).

Oh yeah, and it looks like naltrexone curbs binge drinking, apart from severe alcoholics. Estimates vary but most find that around 10% of Americans have an alcohol problem. There are also indications that semaglutide reduces the appeal of alcohol (here is one clinical trial examining that subject). In the last links post, we mentioned a monoclonal antibody that reduces amphetamine effectiveness. Although none of the anti-addiction medications s mentioned in this post are likely to alone solve concomitant addiction crises, they’re likely to help. We as a society have at least 50 years of experience in trying to resolve addiction crises without extensive medication-assisted treatment, and the results are apparent. The “War on Drugs” hasn’t worked. Talk therapy and 12-Step programs are better than nothing but don’t work all that well on their own. I guess we’re now at the stage where we’re trying MAT more seriously, and soon we’ll be at the stage where we try psychedelic therapy (sample clinical trial, but there are many others). Trying something new when the old isn’t working makes sense at a personal and a societal level.


* If you or anyone you know has struggled with what’s now referred to as “opioid use disorder,” it matters a lot.

* He’s a psychiatrist.

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Grant writing in another time of civil disturbances

Once again, I find myself writing grant proposals during a time of tragic civil disturbances across America.* My entire life and career have been shadowed by such events. I came of age in the 1960s, a time of extreme social unrest, both race-related—like the 1965 Watts Rebellion—as well as often violent anti-Vietnam protests. I went to my first civil rights march in Paducah, KY in 1965 (my older brother was working for the then-new Job Corps there) and participated in many anti-war marches while in college at the University of Minnesota. As I wrote about in my first GWC post in 2007, “They Say a Fella Never Forgets His First Grant Proposal,” I got my grant writing start working as a community organizer in North Minneapolis in 1972. I grew up in North Minneapolis, when it was a Jewish, trending Black, ghetto, and the community was devastated by what were then called “race riots” in 1967 and 1968. In 1972, my job was to try to get some local businesses going again, as North Minneapolis hadn’t recovered—and, in many ways, it still hasn’t recovered.

In 1992, the genesis of what ultimately became Seliger + Associates was born out of the ashes of the civil disturbances following the Rodney King verdict. I happened to be visiting friends in the Hollywood Hills when the disturbances began, and we could see the fire burning across South LA and Koreatown that night from their deck. Based on my experiences over the years, I assumed that huge amounts of federal grant funds would follow soon, and that it might be a good time to ditch my career as as city-slug community development director and try setting up a grant writing business instead. I did just that in 1993 and discovered that there was indeed a market for good grant writing consultants. The timing was also propitious because the incipient Internet allowed us to work for people across the country in a way that wasn’t possible before it.

Flash forward: in 2014, I wrote a post about about grant writing and the Ferguson, MO civil disturbances in which I noted that grant money follows major incidences of civil unrest. The government only has two real tools to use in this situation: the stick of yet more policing (the problems of which are readily observable in the news) or the carrot of grant funds to help the affected communities recover.

As I write this, civil unrest is unfolding from Minneapolis to NYC, LA, and much of the rest of America, following the obvious, videotaped murder of George Floyd.** These horrific images are juxtaposed with the inspiring images of the first manned SpaceX/NASA launch. It’s very troubling to realize that, while much has changed since I was a high school freshman in 1965, some things haven’t; then, I was listening to Barry McGuire’s huge hit single, “Eve of Destruction“: “You may leave here for four days in space, but when you return it’s the same old place.” The reference is to the Gemini 4 flight and civil rights marches/violence of the era. Feels like we’re poised on another Eve of Destruction.

Unlike Ferguson in 2014 and LA in 1992, today’s situation is more like the huge unrest that followed MLK’s assassination in 1968 in that it has radiated out to more than 40 cities and, after five nights of burning and looting, shows no sign of abating. This is unfolding after months of COVID-19 lockdowns, and those most harmed by both the virus and the lockdowns have been low-income communities of color. I’ve worked in and around these communities for over four decades: when the lockdowns began, I thought and discussed privately (but not in a post) that this could lead to great civil unrest. I wasn’t talking about the gun guys marching in front of state capitols, but rather what erupted last week in Minneapolis. While I couldn’t predict the spark, I suspected civil unrest would follow. Force millions of low-income workers to stay at home in overcrowded housing, while their jobs and incomes evaporate, and this outcome should not be surprising. If it wasn’t George Floyd, it would have been something else. I read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time when I was a teen and it rings true today: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water but fire next time.”

The combination of civil unrest and tens of thousands of small businesses closing in places like South Minneapolis and Flatbush in Brooklyn will be devastating for years and possibly decades to come. As noted in a recent New York Times article, “According to one recent poll, nearly 40 percent of adults living in cities have begun to consider moving to less populated areas because of the outbreak. In New York, where I live, roughly 5 percent of the population — or about 420,000 people — have already left.” For the near term, gentrification and densification of cities, big and small, is over.

Still, the twin scourges of COVID-19 and civil unrest will present great grant opportunities for nimble nonprofits, cities, and other public agencies. The three COVID-19 relief bills passed so far are raining over $2 trillion on the country, much in the form of grants, with a fourth bill likely to pass soon. We’ve been writing COVID-19 proposals furiously for two months and know that at least $2.4 million in COVID-related grants we’ve written has already been funded. The inevitable huge increase in available federal grant money, due to the civil unrest, will soon follow. If you run a nonprofit, city department, or school district, once you’re done mourning for George Floyd and recovered from the shock of COVID-19, be ready. The grant waves this time will likely center on primary health care, behavioral health services, workforce development, and economic development. It’s not inconceivable that we’ll eventually address the underlying pathologies that have bedeviled American history since before the country’s founding. But I’ve been hoping for that for decades and it remains elusive.


* For purposes of this post, I’m focusing on the negative aspects of what’s happening, not the legitimate underlying protests against police brutality. I’ll leave the details of those issues to others, while noting that police unions create systemic challenges around dealing with police misconduct; the Supreme Court’s doctrine of qualified immunity is the other challenge. The date stamps on both those links are from years ago; knowledge about these problems has circulated among intellectuals and policy nerds for years.

** On a personal note, I took my Golden Retriever to doggy day care Sunday morning, which I do most Sundays. The store, Posh Pet, is just off the part of Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood that was trashed Saturday night. When I got there, I found this sign in the window: “We have dogs here. Please don’t break window.” The glass door was smashed and the business completely looted. No idea what happened to the dogs being boarded. This small business was barely hanging on, due to COVID-19. Now, it may never reopen.

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NYT: Nonprofits should focus on grant writing, not donations, during the COVID-19 crisis

We’ve written two recent posts on the impact of COVID-19 on nonprofits, “COVID-19, donations, and foundation and government grant proposals” and “Less obvious things that impact human services during the coronavirus pandemic.” During an economic crisis like this one, most nonprofits will probably be gob-smacked with cash flow problems, while demand for services, particularly among human services provides, skyrockets.* Since thousands of businesses are suddenly closed, millions are unemployed, and the stock market is gyrating downward, seeking donations is mostly a waste of time and it’s not possible to hold galas and fundraisers. To avoid organizational disaster, the only option for most nonprofits is to immediately conduct grant source research and start submitting foundation and government grant proposals. If the nonprofit lacks internal capacity to do this, hire a consultant like Seliger + Associates.

A recent New York Times David Streitfeld article confirms this, “A New Mission for Nonprofits During the Outbreak: Survival.” Although Streitfeld incorrectly conflates donations and grants, the articles reaffirms what we said in our posts—foundations react to economic crises, at least in the short term, by vastly increasing their grant making:

Foundations, traditionally not among the spryest of organizations, learned from 9/11 and severe hurricanes that they could move fast. They are quickly retooling to disburse emergency money and relax reporting requirements that are suddenly impossible to meet. Bloomberg Philanthropies, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and 23 other foundations as well as individual donors have created a $78 million Covid-19 rescue fund for New York City nonprofits. Grants will start going out to small and midsize social services and arts and cultural organizations on Monday. Interest-free loans will follow.

In hard-hit Seattle, the Seattle Foundation is administering a $14.3 million emergency program funded by local businesses, foundations and government. It released more than $10 million to 120 organizations this week.

These are probably not “donations,” and the nonprofits will likely have to submit proposals of some sort and, unless nonprofits are actively searching for such foundation support, most will miss out entirely. Foundation largess, however, will not last. Within a few months, the spectacular decline of their endowments will sink in and the the fire hose will be reduced to a normal flow—or even a trickle.

While the NYT piece doesn’t cover it, the same phenomenon is happening with government grants, but at a much higher level. In addition the normal billions of federal grant dollars up for grabs, billions more are included in the three COVID-19 Stimulus Bills passed so far, with Congress likely to past several more bills.

So, the time to seek foundation and government grants is now.


* Since grant writing in the time of COVID-19 is a strange experience, this is good time to read or re-read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s wonderful magical realism novel, Love in the Time of Cholera.

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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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Grant writing and cooking: Too many details or ingredients is never a good idea

As a grant writer who also likes to cook, I understand the importance of simplicity and clarity in both my vocation and avocation: too much detail can ruin the proposal, just as too many ingredients can produce a dull dish. Ten years ago, I wrote a post on the importance of using the KISS method (keep it simple, stupid—or Sally, if you don’t like the word “stupid”) in grant writing. We recently wrote an exceedingly complex state health care proposal for a large nonprofit in a Southern state, but even complex proposals should be as simple as possible—but no simpler.

As is often the case with state programs, the RFP was convoluted and required a complex needs assessment. Still, the project concept and target area were fairly straightforward. We wrote the first draft of the needs assessment in narrative form, rather than using a bunch of tables. There’s nothing intrinsically better or worse about narrative vs. tables; when the RFP is complex, we tend toward narrative form, and when the project concept and/or target area are complex, we often use more tables. For example, if the target population includes both African American and Latino substance abusers in an otherwise largely white community, we might use tables, labeling columns by ethnicity, then compare to the state. That’s hard to do in narrative form. Similarly, if the target area includes lots of counties, some of which are much more affluent than others, we might use tables to contrast the socioeconomic characteristics of the counties to the state.

Many grant reviewers also have trouble reading tables, because they don’t really understand statistics. Tables should also be followed by a narrative paragraph explaining the table anyway.

So: our client didn’t like the first draft and berated me for not using tables in the needs assessment. The customer is not always right, but, as ghostwriters, we accommodate our clients’s feedback, and I added some tables in the second draft. Our client requested more tables and lots of relatively unimportant details about their current programming, much of which wasn’t germane to the RFP questions. Including exhaustive details about current programming takes the proposal focus away from the project you’re trying to get funded, which is seldom a good idea. It’s best to provide sufficient detail to answer the 5 Ws and the H), while telling a compelling story that is responsive to the RFP.

Then, stop.

The client’s second draft edit requested yet more tables and a blizzard of additional, disconnected details. Our client disliked it the third draft. We ended up writing five drafts, instead of the usual three, and the proposal got steadily worse, not better. As chef-to-the-stars Wolfgang Puck* is said to have said, “Cooking is like painting or writing a song. Just as there are only so many notes or colors, there are only so many flavors – it’s how you combine them that sets you apart.” Attempting to use all the flavors at once usually results in a kitchen disaster.

A given section of a proposal should be as short as possible without being underdeveloped. Changes from draft to draft should also be as minimal and specific as possible.


* Jake sort-of-met Wolfgang, albeit before he was born. His mom was eight months pregnant with him when we went to Spago for dinner. Wolfgang was there in his Pillsbury Doughboy getup, and, despite not being celebrities, he couldn’t have been nicer and made a big deal out of a very pregnant woman dining at his place. I think he wanted his food to induce labor, but that didn’t happen for a couple of weeks; instead, Nate ‘n’ Al’s Deli (another celebrity hangout in Beverly Hills), was the culprit. A story for another day.

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Seliger + Associates’ 25th Anniversary: A quarter century of grant writing

My first post, on Nov. 29, 2007, “They Say a Fella Never Forgets His First Grant Proposal,” tells the story of how I became a grant writer (when dinosaurs walked the earth); 500 posts later, this one covers some of the highs and lows of grant writing over the past 25 years, since I founded Seliger + Associates.

Let me take you back to March 1993 . . . President Clinton’s first year in office, Branch Davidians are going wild in Waco, Roy Rogers dies, Intel ships its first Pentium chips, Unforgiven wins the Oscar for Best Picture, and Seliger + Associates is founded. The last item caused no disturbances in the Force or media and was hardly noticed. Still, we’ve created a unique approach to grant writing—although we’re not true believers, I like to think we’ve made a difference for hundreds of clients and their clients in turn.

When I started this business, the Internet existed, but one had to know how to use long forgotten tech tools like text-based FTP servers, “Gopher,” dial-up modems, and so on. While I taught myself how to use these tools, they weren’t helpful for the early years, even though the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, was launched in late 1993. I used a primitive application, HotMTML Pro, to write the HTML code for our first web site around the same time. I didn’t understand how to size the text, however, so on the common 12″ to 14″ monitors of the day, it displayed as “Seliger + Ass”. It didn’t much matter, since few of our clients had computers, let alone Internet access.

Using the Wayback Machine, I found the first, achieved view of our website on December 28, 1996, about two years after we first had a Web presence. If this looks silly, check out Apple.com’s first web archive on October 22, 1996. You could get a new PowerBook 1400 with 12 MB of RAM and a 750 MB hard drive for only $1,400, while we were offering a foundation appeal for $3,000!

Those were the days of land line phones, big Xerox machines, fax machines, direct mail for marketing, FedEx to submit proposals, going to a public library to use microfiche for research data, waiting for the Federal Register to arrive by mail about a week after publication, and an IBM Selectric III to type in hard copy forms. Our first computer was a IMB PS 1 with an integrated 12″ monitor running DOS with Windows 3.1 operating very slowly as a “shell” inside DOS.

Despite its challenges, using DOS taught me about the importance of file management.

As our business rapidly in the mid to late 1990s, our office activities remained about the same, except for getting faster PCs, one with a revolutionary CD-ROM drive (albeit also with 5 1/14″ and 3.5″ floppy drives, which was how shrink-wrapped software was distributed); a peer-to-peer coax cable network I cobbled together; and eventually being able to get clients to hire us without me having to fly to them for in-person pitch meetings.

It wasn’t until around 2000 that the majority of our clients became computer literate and comfortable with email. Most of our drafts were still faxed back and forth between clients and all proposals went in as multiple hard-copy submissions by FedEx or Express Mail. For word processing, we used WordPro, then an IBM product, and one that, in some respects, was better than Word is today. We finally caved and switched to Macs and Office for Mac around 2005.

Among the many after shocks of 9/11, as well as the bizarre but unrelated anthrax scare, there were enormous disruptions to mail and Fedex delivery to government offices. Perhaps in recognition of this—or just the evolving digital world—the feds transitioned to digital uploads and the first incarnation of grants.gov appeared around 2005. It was incredibly unreliable and used an odd propriety file format “kit file,” which was downloaded to our computers, then proposal files would be attached, and then emailed to our clients for review and upload. This creaky system was prone to many errors. About five years ago, grants.gov switched to an Acrobat file format for the basket-like kit file, but the upload / download drill remained cumbersome. On January 1, 2018, grants.gov 3.0 finally appeared in the form of the cloud-based WorkSpace, which allows applications to be worked on and saved repeatedly until the upload button is pushed by our client (the actual applicant). But this is still not amazon.com, and the WorkSpace interface is unnecessarily convoluted and confusing.

Most state and local government funding agencies, along with many foundations, also moved away from hard copy submissions to digital uploads over the past decade. These, of course, are not standardized and each has its owns peccadilloes. Incredibly, some funders (mostly state and local governments and many foundations) still—still!—require dead tree submission packages sent in via FedEx or hand-delivered.

There have of course been many other changes, mostly for the better, to the way in which we complete proposals. We have fast computers and Internet connections, cloud-based software and file sharing, efficient peripherals, and the like. Grant writing, however, remains conceptually “the same as it ever was.” Whether I was writing a proposal long hand on a legal pad in 1978, using my PS 1 in 1993, or on my iMac today in 2018, I still have to develop a strong project concept, answer the 5 Ws and H within the context of the RFP structure, tell a compelling story, and work with our clients to enable them to submit a technically correct proposal in advance of the deadline.

Another aspect of my approach to grant writing also remains constant. I like to have a Golden Retriever handy to bounce ideas of of, even though they rarely talk back. My last Golden mix, Boogaloo Dude, had to go to the Rainbow Bridge in November. Now, my fourth companion is a very frisky four-month old Golden, Sedro-Woolley, named after the Cascades foothill town to which I used to take Jake and his siblings fishing when they were little and Seliger + Associates and myself were still young.

 

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Bad news in new tax bill for nonprofits that depend on small- to medium-sized donations

I recently wrote about Bad and good news for FQHCs in the latest Republican tax bill, and last week, the Republican tax bill passed under its official title, “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” (TCJA). Like it or not, the TCJA is now law and I’m continuing to look at its implications for nonprofits and grant seeking. As reported by the Washington Post, “Charities fear tax bill could turn philanthropy into a pursuit only for the rich.”

Why? The combination of doubling the standard deduction and limiting the deductibility state/local taxes and mortgage interest will likely significantly reduce charitable donations by middle and upper middle income Americans. Those people would need very high deductions to bother itemizing, so many won’t. That’s very bad news for smaller to mid-size nonprofits that depend on donations.

Unlike businesses, which can enter new markets and develop new products, nonprofits have relatively few revenue possibilities (the main ones they do have are listed at the link). In addition to grants and fee-for-service contracts (e.g., foster care, substance abuse treatment, homeless shelter beds, etc.), these are limited to membership dues (for member organizations like Boys & Girls Clubs, animal rescues, etc.), fundraisers, and donations. The latter three will be impacted by the TCJA.

While every nonprofit executive director dreams of landing a donor “whale,” mega-donors are not only rare but tend to give to larger and well-connected nonprofits (the rarely acknowledged “swamp” of philanthropy, if you will). The booming stock market and lowered corporate tax rate will likely to produce more whales, but many of these will donate to corporate or family foundations—not garden variety human services nonprofits toiling away in relative obscurity. We’ve had many conversations with executive directors whose nonprofits are doing good work but find it hard to translate “good work” into “increased donations.”

Nonprofit executive directors will have to make a choice that will become more acute in 2018: cast off in the whale boat to search for Moby-Dick or chase schools of small donation fish. The former strategy is usually pointless and the later is time consuming work that will become harder as many Americans realize that there won’t be a tax deduction reward because they won’t itemize.

The silver lining is that foundation portfolios are being engorged by the historically high bull market. They’ll also receive huge donations from corporations and the upper-income people, who will get much of the direct benefits from the TCJA. No matter what, foundations must distribute 5% of their assets every year, and we offer foundation appeals in part with that in mind to clients.

Also, federal spending on discretionary grant programs continues to rise and most states should see increased tax revenue, some of which will be allocated to grant programs. As budgetary chaos subsides, federal agencies will resume normal RFP patterns.

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Why do grant writing firms market so many disparate services?

We’ve seen a lot of would-be grant writing competitors come and go, and the ones that commonly go have something in common: they offer a huge array of disparate services. Grant writing. Program development. Board training. Evaluation. Curriculums. Lobbying. Staff training. Guacamole recipes.

Okay, I made that last one up. Still, a cliché encapsulates the disparate-service approach of some firms: “Jack of all trades and master of none.” I see firms marketing half a dozen (or more) different services and think they’re likely not very good at any. How many restaurants make six different cuisines well? None, or nearly none. Any single field, including the highly specialized form of technical writing that is grant writing, is extremely difficult to master. Few firms are likely to have mastered many, vaguely related, and specialized services.*

To my mind, claiming to do even three disparate things at a professional level is improbable. Advertising many together seems like the mark of an amateur, or someone chucking as many stones as they can in order to see what hits. Individual targeting of one or two services is more likely to yield a good outcome.

Grant writing and marketing, for example, have very little to do with each other. Even grant writing and donor management are very different skills, much like coding software is a very different skill from selling software—even if both positions involve software in some way.

Not surprisingly, I recently saw a particular firm’s website that demonstrates some of these themes. I’m not going to name it, but if you’ve been around the nonprofit block a few times you’ve probably seen it or ones similar to it.


* The possible exception to this is of course Amazon, which is (so far) successfully mastering an astonishing and growing array of unrelated-seeming services.

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Favorite odd-but-mandatory proposal forms: LA Slavery and New York Northern Ireland edition

Experienced grant writers know that all proposal instructions must be followed as precisely as possible (though they can also be contradictory—a problem we discovered in a recent Department of Education RFP). Perhaps because of that principle, funders (or their political masters) also get the chance to include absurd or bizarre forms with RFPs. Some of our favorites include ones from City of Los Angeles Departments, since the City requires that firms it contracts with, including nonprofits, certify that the organization wasn’t been involved in slavery. For those of you keeping track at home, slavery ended in the United States in 1865 and Seliger + Associates was founded in 1993.

Today was I working on behalf of a New York client and ran into the “Empire State After-School Program,” which is a fairly standard after school program not so different from the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program or many other, similar programs. But this one is issued by the state of New York, and, amid the pile of pretty typical required documents (like “Non-Collusive Bidding Certification Required by Section 139d of the State Finance Law (OCFS-2634)”) was one that caught my attention: “MacBride Fair Employment Principles in Northern Ireland (OCFS-2633).”

Northern Ireland?

I was curious enough to follow the link to the form and found that grantees for this program apparently must certify as to whether it has ever conducted business in Northern Ireland. If it has, these instructions apply, and the applicant:

Shall take lawful steps in good faith to conduct any business operations that it has in Northern Ireland in accordance with the MacBride Fair Employment Principles relating to non-discrimination in employment and freedom of workplace opportunity regarding such operations in Northern Ireland, and shall permit independent monitoring of its compliance with such principles.

I don’t know what discriminatory practices might be common in Northern Ireland. Nor do I know why New York State in particular is concerned with this tiny corner of the world. Out of curiosity, I checked the CIA World Factbook, and it says that Ireland’s entire population is a smidgen under five million, or about 60% the size of New York City’s alone.

Somewhere back there in the haze of New York political history must be some Irish-related controversy that lives on, to this day, in the form of a form that random nonprofits providing after-school services must include or risk being rejected as technically incorrect. Keep in mind that in the good old days of 1931, the Empire State Building was built in one year and 45 days. I’m pretty sure the developer did not have to fill out a Slavery or Northern Ireland form, which likely speedup up the process. Sometimes I see the more absurd aspects of grant writing and think about cost disease and how computers have paradoxically made grant writing worse.

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It’s possible to get re-programmed funds, if you’re tight with your federal agency program officer

In 2010 Isaac wrote “Be Nice to Your Program Officer: Reprogrammed / Unobligated Federal Funds Mean Christmas May Come Early and Often This Year,” and that post is important for the context of this story. We’ve written several funded grants for the same federal program for the same client over the last few years. The client is a national trade group, and last week our client contact called because he’d just gotten a random call from his program officer offering a large tranche of re-programmed funds. That money doesn’t come with any strings beyond the general restrictions on the initial grant-funded program. It’s also a sure thing, which is a rare, valuable thing in the grant world.*

Organizations that get re-programmed funds still have to submit a proposal (which may be short). However short, the proposal for re-programmed funds must be technically correct and usually has a quick turnaround time (this always happens near the end of the federal fiscal year, which is September 30). As a cautionary note, we’ve seen clients who’ve messed up their wired, re-programmed applications. Overall, though, the amount of effort required is usually far smaller than a conventional, competitive grant program.

When Isaac worked for the City of Inglewood in the 1980s, the FAA (yes, the Federal Aviation Administration) gave Inglewood re-programmed funds almost every year for about eight years. That happened because the City of Los Angeles had to relocate several thousand families to extend one LAX runway on the Pacific Ocean side. You can see the vacant land when you take off from LAX and just before the plane crosses the beach.

At the same time, Inglewood, where Isaac was the Redevelopment Manager, was removing about 800 families from under the flight path to the east of LAX, near The Forum and the site of the new LA Rams stadium, for redevelopment. To keep Inglewood from joining all the other players who were suing LAX over the runway extension, a deal was struck in which LAX convinced the FAA to accept grant applications from Inglewood for wholesale land acquisition with “noise mitigation” being the ruse or quid pro quo.

All of this was on the down low, of course, and Isaac wrote all the FAA proposals, which totaled over $25 million. The FAA liked Inglewood, mostly because it could spend the money quickly while accounting for it, so Isaac got a call every August from the FAA program officer asking if Inglewood wanted additional re-programmed funds. The answer was always… yes. Sometimes, all you have to do is not screw it up.


* And bars after 11 on a Saturday night.