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Partnerships to Improve Community Health (PICH)—Riding the CDC Grant Gravy Train

Even after a hundred years as a grant writer, the feds never cease to amaze me. Last week, it was the CDC issuing a Funding Opportunity Announcement (“FOA,” which is CDC-speak for RFP) for an entirely new program: Partnerships to Improve Community Health (PICH). The program is funded through the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—or ObamaCare as it is sometimes known to its many friends.

PICH is great news: as Pink Floyd put it in Have a Cigar: “And did we tell you the name of the game, boy? We call it riding the gravy train.” This post explains the game.

The game is walkin’ around money, as we explain at the link. In this case, there’s $150,000,000 up for grabs, with max grants ranging from $1,000,000 to $4,000,000, depending on the population of the service area.

What makes PICH nearly pitch-perfect walkin’ around money is that the program funds community collaboratives that meet to essentially talk about improving health, but not actually do anything, like deliver healthcare. It’s all process and no services. This means that the grantee only has to form the collaborative, hold meetings, conduct needs assessments and develop the ever popular action plans. Since there are no services, there’s nothing to evaluate, except process objectives like the “composition” of the collaborative, number of meetings held, plans drafted, long tons of donuts consumed during meetings, and the like.

This should make most public health officers and nonprofit executive directors swoon. Get a PICH grant and you’ll definitely be riding the gravy train. And, since you’ll be the one with the gravy ladle, other organizations in your service area will be sitting on their hind legs begging for the sub-grants that are required under PICH.

For example, say you’re Executive Director or Chairwoman of the Healthy Owatonna Collaborative. To make your pitch for a PICH grant, you’ll need to gather input from, and meet the needs of, all segments of the “community.” An easy way to accomplish this is to propose involvement of population-specific or advocacy groups in the planning and implementation process.

If cyclopes are an important population in Owatonna, propose a subcontract in your proposal with the Owatonna Cyclops Improvement Association, which has its eye, so to speak, on health issues confronting cyclopses in Owatonna. The ability to pass out big subcontracts to local advocacy organizations is going to make you very popular, as lots of organizations will try to get their snouts into the PICH trough. The applicant and lead agency is the Gatekeeper to this largesse.*

An interesting aspect of PICH is applicant eligibility:

  • Government Organizations: Local public health offices, American Indian tribes or Alaskan Native villages, local housing authorities, school districts, or local transportation authorities.
  • Non-government Organizations: Nonprofits with 501(c)3 IRS status (other than institution of higher education), or nonprofits without 501(c)3 IRS status (other than institution of higher education.

Two aspects of the listed eligible organizations are curious. First, essentially every kind of non-business entity is eligible to apply for PICH, except colleges and universities, for some arcane reason. Universities are unlikely to want to improve local health, but transportation authorities are? Welcome to the odd world of federal grantmaking.

Second, nonprofits with or without 501(c)3 status are eligible. Most people’s reaction to the eligibility of nonprofit, but not tax-exempt, organizations is probably “WTF?

Let me explain.

Many community collaboratives for various purposes (e.g., health improvement, substance abuse prevention, services to homeless cyclopses, etc.) are actually unincorporated associations composed of representatives of nonprofit and public agencies, who get together once a month or so to eat donuts, drink beer (if they’re lucky), and opine on the subject of interest. In most states, however, it’s very easy to get a charter for the collaborative as a nonprofit corporation. As we’ve written about before, the hard part is not incorporating—it’s getting a 501(c3) letter of determination out of the IRS. So the CDC is encouraging informal collaboratives, which are willing to incorporate, or incorporated nonprofits, to apply. Very sweet.

Now, don’t let the fact that your agency may not actually be part of an existing health collaborative prevent you from applying. Remember, this is the proposal world, not the real world. A good grant writer should be able to create a plausible collaborative out of polka dots and moonbeams. I know we can, as we’ve written many funded proposals like PICH over the years, including an $800,000 HRSA Community Access Program (CAP) grant for a rural public health department in Illinois, a $900,000 OCS CCF-CEY capacity building grant for a youth services collaborative in Wisconsin, a $2,000,000 CDC Capacity Building grant for a national HIV/AIDs coalition serving African Americans, and a $2,000,000 CDC REACH-US grant for a collaborative in Virginia to reduce the incidence of diabetes.


* Sigouney Weaver, as Dana, was possessed by the Gatekeeper demon, while Rick Moranis as the hapless Louis was possessed by the Keymaster demon in the 1984 classic Ghostbusters, which was Jake’s favorite movie as a kid.