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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 writers: SAMHSA’s “Services Program for Residential Treatment for Pregnant and Postpartum Women” (PPW) program

Grant writers may have seen the NOFO for SAMHSA’s FY ’23″Services Program for Residential Treatment for Pregnant and Postpartum Women” (PPW) program, which has $11.5 million available for 22 grants of up to $525,000 per year for five years—implying a lifetime total availability $57.5 million. Smart nonprofit and public agencies will look closely at SAMHSA’s PPW program, given the large amount of funding at stake and the clear need for more residential treatment beds. We can help: call us at 800.540.8906 ext. 1 or contact us to get a fast, free fee quote that will help your nonprofit or public agency write a winning proposal. SAMHSA’s 83-page FY ’23 PPW NOFO likely contains many gotchas and other surprises that we’ll ferret out—leaving you free to run your organization.

The PPW program offers funding for pregnant and/or postpartum women to get help with substance-use disorders (SUDs), along with housing and wraparound supportive services that will help aid recovery. Basically, SAMHSA’s “Services Program for Residential Treatment for Pregnant and Postpartum Women” (PPW) looks to provide not only treatment and amelioration of SUD, but also all the wraparound supportive services that a pregnant or postpartum woman might need to remain sober and take care of her child, or children. The goal of the program should remind you of the goal for the HRSA Healthy Start Initiative (HSI) grant program: both programs fund similar activities, even if the funding agency differs and PPW is for residential, not outpatient, services.

SAMHSA’s PPW program wants to lower the total level of infant mortality, and the total level of maternal mortality. It has a bit of the old “Pathways to Responsible Fatherhood” RFP feel too, in that PPW seeks to, wherever possible, promote family stability and family unification. I’m reminded of the way that there are various essays and research reports out there observing that female college graduates are overwhelmingly married when they have kids, as was true in the 1960s; among the non-graduates, however, marriage rates have cratered. Here’s one report along those lines, although one could dig up many others. As it says: “Marriage used to be a classless phenomenon. But, not anymore: in 2008, marriage rates amongst college-educated 30-year-olds surpassed those without a degree for the first time.” More educated women tend to have kids with a spouse, and less educated women tend to have kids without a spouse, and in an unstable households. I’ve seen calls that educated women (and men) should “preach what they practice”—that is, speak up about the need to get married prior to having kids, and to avoid having kids in the midst of turbulent, uncommitted relationships. Child support doesn’t replace fathers, in this view.

The above paragraph has some ideas in it that need to be approached delicately and tastefully in a proposal, and experienced grant writers will understand how to do this. Nonetheless, intact families are part of what SAMHSA is dancing around in its NOFO. The NOFO emphasizes that “Services Program for Residential Treatment for Pregnant and Postpartum Women” (PPW) applicants need to offer in-patient services in facilities, usually one or more single-family houses, overseen by round-the-clock staff supervision. Applicants should probably have a psychiatrist on staff or via contract at least part of the time. The challenge with the PPW NOFO will likely include having a facility that is zoned correctly and that the applicant can use. Well, that, and getting staff for what might be a challenging patient population.

There are a number of straightforward required activities: treatment includes the typical assessment process, which will lead to some form of “Individual Improvement Plan” (IIP) or the like, which will tailor SUD treatment for the individual’s needs. The applicant will come up with appropriate instruments to be deployed. Treatment will include medications—thus the the psychiatrist, physicians assistants (PAs), and other waivered providers with prescribing power—and the overall goal is to manage the SUD to the extent possible. Overall, this is an intriguing NOFO for federally qualified health centers (FQHCs), as well as other substance abuse providers.

Contact us for more information. Let us make your grant seeking experience easier.

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SAMHSA’s “Grants for the Benefit of Homeless Individuals” (GBHI) and grant writers

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) “Grants for the Benefit of Homeless Individuals” (GBHI) Notice of Funding Availability (NOFO) should appeal to grant writers and grant applicants because the program is offering funding for activities that many homelessness services organizations are already doing—most notably, providing funding for various kinds of substance use disorder (SUD) / opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment, and, in particular, medication assisted treatment (MAT). MAT is also now easier to administer, because the “waivered prescriber” requirement has been waived. In the FY ’23 GBHI NOFO, there’s $75 million available over five years for up to thirty-two awards, and grants go for five years, with half a million per year—overall, it’s a desirable grant program. If your nonprofit organization wants to apply for SAMHSA’s “Grants for the Benefit of Homeless Individuals” program, call us at 800.540.8906 ext. 1, or email us at seliger@seliger.com, for a FREE quote on writing this SAMHSA application, or any other proposal.

The SAMHSA NOFO notes that GBHI applicants should provide a fairly typical suit of services for homeless individuals, including SUD/OUD treatment (likely via MAT, as noted above) and assistance to overcome chronic or episodic homelessness. Nonprofits are eligible. The program should probably include peer workers (often called “community health workers” or similar—”CHWs” is a fine acronym) who are going to liaise with the target population of focus.

The trick for all these programs is outside the ability of applicants to affect: getting enough housing built at all, for anyone and everyone, which is a point we’ve made in “‘Homelessness is a Housing Problem’: When cities build more housing, homelessness goes down.” Building housing for anyone is hard, which means building it for the homelessness (or whatever euphemism one may choose) is even harder. Fortunately, the SAMHSA GBHI program wants to offer help with finding or showing permanent housing through “collaboration,” including with public housing authorities (PHAs). So applicants that are, or can get, a homelessness services provider to help will be aided, even if most of the target population doesn’t wind up with a permanent living situation. Finally, typical case management services are required; for case management, applicant should probably propose an approach in which CHWs will provide warm handoffs to case management professionals. Treatment of substance-use disorder and mental illness itself is also an eligible cost, which will be appealing to healthcare organizations.

Distributing naloxone, opioid test strips, and similar harm reduction supplies are eligible activities. SAMHSA also specifically tells applicants that they need something like a “Participant Advisory Council” (PAC) to offer oversight, but SAMHSA has adopted another term: a “steering committee.” Whatever the name, the purpose is the same, and should be familiar to veteran grant writers. Beyond that, various kinds of other activities are optional, including HIV prevention, and training staff in evidence-based practices (EBPs) like Motivational Interviewing (MI) or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). How many of these activities really make it from the proposal world to the actual world? Probably not all of them, but some. SAMHSA also has an EBP warehouse that applicants can choose from, but most EBPs are essentially different routes up the same mountain.

Regardless of the route, the journey is arduous; the number of interventions that it takes to get a homeless person with SUD sober and off the street can number in the dozens, if not hundreds. Outsiders often don’t realize this. If you don’t work in the homelessness-services field, ask someone who works in emergency rooms what the population of focus for the “Grants for the Benefit of Homeless Individuals” (GBHI) program is like. The organizations operating GBHI programs are doing tough work. Grant writers should be able to evoke that work, without being melodramatic about it.

Want that GBHI grant? Contact us, so we can help make it happen. We’re here to help, and to make your life easier.

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What counts as an eligible service area for SAMHSA’s “Resiliency in Communities After Stress and Trauma” (ReCAST) program?

Long ago, we wrote about what grant writers and applicants should do when confronted by a poorly organized RFP; because little external pressure pushes federal agencies to write RFPs that make sense, one finds too many RFPs that leave a lot of questions. SAMHSA’s “Resiliency in Communities After Stress and Trauma” (ReCAST) Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) is a case in point: eligible applicants are those “communities that have recently faced civil unrest, community violence, and/or collective trauma within the past 24 months.” Okay: the NOFO will surely get more specific, right? But the ReCAST NOFO says that “Community violence is defined as the exposure to intentional acts of interpersonal violence committed in public spaces by individuals who are not related to the victim.” Okay: but how much violence? Do two murders count? Do two instances of battery count? Almost every city of any size has likely experienced at least two “intentional acts of interpersonal violence” committed by strangers in the prior 24 months. So how much is enough? Is more better, for purposes of being funded by this program? How are applicants to judge the feasibility of being funded? Being able to have some sense of eligibility is key, because preparing and submitting a SAMHSA application isn’t a minor endeavor.

Then there is the issue of “collective trauma.” Do natural disasters count? I’ve read the definitions of “collective trauma” on pages 8 – 9 of the ReCAST NOFO, and I’ve gone through all 41 uses of the word “trauma,” but I don’t see an answer to that specific question. Natural disasters are violent and often cause injury and death, which makes me lean towards “yes,” but the emphasis on “civil unrest” seems to point to a very specific set of issues that SAMHSA has in mind.

So I sent an email to the SAMHSA contact person, Jennifer Treger, asking her a version of the above. She wrote back: “Thank you for your inquiry. Please refer back to the definition that you have pointed out on pages 8-9 of the funding opportunity. If you determine your community meets the eligibility based on the definitions, please feel free to submit an application.” But how am I, or anyone else, supposed to judge whether a specific community is eligible based on that vague definition? I tried asking her in another version, and she reiterated, unhelpfully, that “We can only respond to what is in the NOFO.”

She also wrote that: “You can determine if you feel your community meets the definition for Collective Trauma as stated in the NOFO.” But the problem is that how I “feel” doesn’t matter at all to SAMHSA in determining eligibility; only SAMHSA’s judgments matter (SAMHSA has the money). It’d be useful for SAMHSA to list, in its view, which communities have had sufficient “civil unrest, community violence, and/or collective trauma within the past 24 months” to qualify for ReCAST. Or, alternately, what metrics they’d use. An FBI Uniform Crime Rate (UCR) of x per 1,000 people, for example, would be a specific metric.

Too many federal agencies love the latitude that vagueness implies. It’s hard to advise our clients on whether they should apply to ReCAST without more specifics, but those specifics evidently aren’t going to be forthcoming. I guess we’ll have to try to look at our feelings and our client’s feelings, and hope SAMHSA feels what we feel.

For more on similar matters, see RFP Lunacy and Answering Repetitive or Impossible Questions: HRSA and Dental Health Edition.

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Substance Abuse Disorder/Opioid Use Disorder (SUD/OUD): Traditional treatment versus harm reduction for grant writers

We’ve been writing Substance Use Disorder / Opioid Use Disorder (SUD/OUD) treatment grant proposals since 1993, so we’ve been at it for long enough to see waves of funder preferences around approaches come and go. SUD/OUD are hard problems, and made harder because of the misinformation and disinformation about Oxycodone and Oxycontin that Purdue Pharma and its subsidiaries spread for decades, in a way that’s likely worse than the way the cigarette companies once marketed their wares.

For the first 20 years or so in business, the SUD/OUD treatment grant proposals we wrote were usually based on the standard “Step-Down” paradigm, in which people with addiction receive treatment along a continuum of care from a high level of care and then “step down” to lower care levels in increments, leading to eventual recovery and self-care. Following engagement, referral, or self-presentation and development of an individual treatment plan (ITP), the step-down levels are more or less like this:

  • Detoxification/hospitalization
  • Inpatient treatment
  • Intensive outpatient treatment
  • Outpatient treatment, often including 12-Step peer support groups and, for those with OUD, medication assisted treatment (MAT)
  • Recovery and self-care

The levels can be further broken down, but the above is a common schema. As patients move down the treatment continuum, they usually receive case-managed wraparound supportive services—like legal assistance, workforce development, primary/dental care, affordable housing, etc.— at least until they are in recovery and have been “clean and sober” for six to twelve months. The “affordable housing” part has gotten much harder, though, because most cities use zoning laws to restrict the supply of housing, which causes prices to rise, which makes a given housing unit difficult for a grant-funded organization, or a person with drug addiction, to afford. Also, it’s an unfortunate reality that most people with SUD/OUD will relapse multiple times, sending them to the top of the treatment pyramid again. In this way, step-down treatment is something like the classic board game Chutes and Ladders I played as a kid. “Step down” was the main “treatment game” available for decades, although methadone was sometimes used for what we now call OUD.

About ten years ago, we began noticing a difference in SAMSHA, HRSA, and other RFPs for SUD/OUD: those agencies now want usually applicants to augment treatment to include “harm reduction.” As defined and described by SAMHSA, “Harm reduction is critical to keeping people who use drugs alive and as healthy as possible, and is a key pillar in the multi-faceted Health and Human Services’ Overdose Prevention Strategy.” Most of our clients resisted this shift but have gradually gotten on board the harm reduction train as pure harm reduction RFPs, like SAMHSA’s “FY ’22 Harm Reduction NOFO,” began to appear. The shift isn’t surprising, because in grant seeking it pays to follow the golden rule. No, not that golden rule, this one: “The people with the gold make the rules.”

Harm reduction projects usually involve a van-based outreach model in which Peer Support Workers (PSWs) go in teams to what are termed “hot spots” to engage people living with SUD/OUD. “Hot spots” include places like homeless encampments, shelters, parks, etc. The outreach effort can be either obvious (e.g., signage on the van and PSWs in logo t-shirts) or on the down low (e.g., plain white van and PSWs in street clothes), or a hybrid version using magnetic signs placed on the van, or removed from it, depending on the needs of a particular location on a given day. The PSWs distribute harm reduction supplies like clean syringes (with or without exchange), alcohol swabs, sterile water ampules, spoons, fentanyl test strips, sharps containers, and condoms, along with emergency food, clothing, hygiene items, and so forth. The outreach van is also used to provide some direct services in the field like wound care, rapid HIV tests, and naloxone administration.

The most extreme version of harm reduction are safe injection sites: while these are illegal in most of America because the drugs themselves are technically illegal, if widely available, three safe injection sites have recently and prominently opened, two in NYC and one in San Francisco. One key problem with a safe injection site initiative is that few businesses or residents want one near them, much like no one wants to be in proximity of a methadone clinic, so permitting is a real challenge. We’ve yet to write a safe injection site proposal but likely soon will.

A key difference between the standard treatment model and the harm reduction model is that clients are typically not tracked (when Joe or Mary shows up for supplies, their identity isn’t verified and they aren’t entered into a client database for tracking), and, most significantly, services aren’t case-managed. PSWs will offer “warm handoffs” for follow-up treatment like MAT and other center-based services, but there’s no automated follow-up from the harm reduction team.

We’re just grant writers, so we don’t have an immediate opinion as to whether step-down treatment or harm reduction is more efficacious, and most studies on the subject are somewhat questionable, although every treatment/harm reduction proposal we write claims the project design uses “evidence-based practices” (EBPs). When in doubt, claim both “evidence” and “innovation” for your program, leaving aside that those two are often mutually exclusive. If your agency provides SUD/OUD treatment, consider adding a harm reduction component, as this is clearly where the feds are going with grant funds. A cynic might conclude that the feds are pushing harm reduction because it’s much cheaper than providing longitudinal case-managed treatment, but we’ll leave that conclusion to others.

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Why we like writing SAMHSA proposals: the RFP structure is clear and never changes

We wrote our first funded Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA) grant about 25 years ago, and there’s something notable about SAMHSA: unlike virtually all of their federal agency sisters, SAMHSA RFPs are well structured. Even better, the RFP structure seemingly never changes—or at least not for the past quarter century. This makes drafting a SAMHSA proposal refreshingly straightforward and enables us, and other competent writers, to (relatively) easily and coherently spin our grant writing “Tales of Brave Ulysses.” The word “coherently” in the preceding sentence is important: RFPs that destroy narrative flow by asking dozens of unrelated sub-questions also destroy the coherence of the story the writer is trying to tell and the program the writer is trying to describe. SAMHSA RFPs typically allow the applicant to answer the 5Ws and H.

A SAMHSA RFP almost always uses a variation on a basic, five element structure:

  • Section A: Population of Focus and Statement of Need
  • Section B: Proposed Implementation Approach
  • Section C: Proposed Evidence-Based Service/Practice
  • Section D: Staff and Organizational Experience
  • Section E: Data Collection and Performance Measurement

While SAMHSA RFPs, of course, include many required sub-headers that demand corresponding details, this structure lends itself to the standard outline format that we prefer (e.g., I.A.1.a). We like using outlines, because it makes it easy for us to organize our presentation and for reviewers to find responses to specific items requested in the RFP—as long as the outlines make sense and, as noted above, don’t interrupt narrative flow. In this respect, SAMHSA RFPs are easy for us to work with.

In recent years, SAMSHA has also reduced the maximum proposal length (exclusive of many required attachments) from 25 single-spaced pages to, in many cases, 10 single-spaced pages. Although it’s generally harder to write about complex subjects with a severe page limit than a much longer page limit, we’re good at packing a lot into a small space.* A novice grant writer, however, is likely to be intimidated by a SAMHSA RFP, due to the forbidding nature of the typical project concept and the brief page limit. In our experience, very long proposals are rarely better and are often worse than shorter ones.

We haven’t talked in this post about what SAMHSA does, because the nature of the organization’s mission doesn’t necessarily affect the kinds of RFPs the organization produces. Still, and not surprisingly, given its name, SAMSHA is the primary direct federal funder of grants for substance abuse and persistent mental illness prevention and treatment. With the recent and continuing tsunami of the twin co-related scourges of opioid use disorder (OUD) and homelessness, Congress has appropriated greater funding for SAMHSA and the agency is going through one of its cyclical rises in prominence in the grant firmament. Until we as a society get a handle on the opioid crisis, SAMHSA is going to get a lot of funding and attention.


* When writing a short proposal in response to a complex RFP, keep Rufo’s small luggage in Robert Heinlein’s Glory Road in mind: “Rufo’s baggage turned out to be a little black box about the size and shape of a portable typewriter. He opened it. And opened it again. And kept on opening it–And kept right on unfolding its sides and letting them down until the durn thing was the size of a small moving van and even more packed.” The bag was bigger on the inside than the outside, like a well-written SAMHSA proposal.

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SAMHSA’s Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment (SBRIT) and FQHCs

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) just issued the FY ’18 Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA): it has $35 million for five-year grants up to about $1 million per year for assessment/referral to substance abuse treatment—and, most interestingly for our discussion, FQHCs are listed among the laundry list of eligible applicants.

SAMHSA is pointing the way forward for many substance abuse providers: become an FQHC. This may seem odd, because FQHCs are supposed to be primary health care providers, while substance abuse treatment is not considered primary healthcare and is usually provided by narrowly focused agencies. But the depth of the opioid epidemic, in tandem with the overall growth of healthcare funding, means that many substance abuse providers are being pushed towards becoming FQHCs—even as many FQHCs are also being encouraged to expand into substance abuse treatment. And we know that, when it comes to the Feds, “encouraged” is often a euphemism for “get ‘er done.”

Many FQHCs, of course, don’t want to be substance abuse providers—but, as programs like SBRIT show, the amount of money available may be too tempting to refuse. Right now, it’s also tough for FQHCs to stretch their Section 330 grants to provide fully integrated behavioral heath services, including substance abuse treatment. HRSA occasionally issues Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) for FQHCs to enhance behavioral health services, but the operative word is “occasionally,” and there’s not enough HRSA funding for behavioral health services.

Few, if any, of our FQHC clients, have had SAMSHA grants and most are reluctant to apply. This may be a case of grant “tunnel vision” in which FQHCs focus on HRSA in the same way that public housing authorities (PHAs) often tether themselves to HUD grants. The wider grant universe, however, provides opportunities for diversity that can help organizations weather shifts in funder priorities. And to paraphrase a salesman’s advice given to William Holden’s Joe Gillis in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, “As long as the lady is paying for it, why not take the Vicuna?”

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Links: Grant writing training, Los Angeles, hospitals, skyscrapers, land use, bikes, SAMHSA disfunction, illnesses and more!

* A new study says it doesn’t matter how much time you spend with your kids. Anxious and neurotic upper-middle-class parents, consider yourself relieved. I don’t (particularly) recall wanting to wanting extensively to interact with my parents when I was a kid, though maybe my memory is flawed. (Lancy’s The Anthropology of Childhood is also relevant here.)

* We’ve updated the Seliger.com FAQ pages. Check it out! There’s even a new question, answered. We’ve also changed our stance, but not our emphasis, on grant writing training.

* “Finding the Dense City Hidden in Los Angeles,” which surprises me too.

* “Radical Vaccine Design Effective Against Herpes Viruses,” which is hugely important in many ways, and the development of this vaccine should retard AIDS transmission.

* As demand for welders resurges community colleges offer classes. Call this a counter-cyclical story!

* “An Interview With the NYU Professor Banned From the United Arab Emirates,” which tells you a lot about NYU.

* On government, voting, and costs.

* “Hospitals Are Robbing Us Blind: Forget Obamacare. The real villains in the American health care system are greedy hospitals and the politicians who protect them.”

* “Skyscrapers are all too evidently phallic symbols, monuments to capitalism and icons of hubris. Yet Will Self can’t help but love them. He explores their significance – from JG Ballard to Mad Men, and from London to Dubai.” I love skyscrapers too.

* “Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost“—in financial, equality, and other terms.

* “Slumber Party! Casper leads a new crowd of startups in the $14 billion mattress industry, trying to turn the most utilitarian of purchases into a quirky, shareable adventure. Wake up to the new world of selling the fundane.”

* “Why I keep fixing my bike,” which is shockingly beautiful and about more than just the bike.

* “Bungling the Job on Substance Abuse and Mental Health: Employees at this federal agency rank it 298th out of 315 in a list of best places to work in the government.” Based on our interactions with SAMHSA we can’t say we’re surprised. Perhaps they should have more mental health counseling and coaching for SAMHSA staff? If so, we can definitely suggest some curriculums.

* “Thinking too highly of higher ed,” by Peter Thiel, who also wrote Zero to One (which you, like everyone, should read).

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The Existence of Drug Courts Implicitly Acknowledgement Failed Public Policy: An Example From the “Grants to Expand Substance Abuse Treatment Capacity” Program

Occasionally, an RFP will inadvertently show how one part of the government recognizes and tries to mitigate the unfortunate effects that come from another part of the government.

We—naturally—have an example of this principle in action: readers of last week’s e-mail grant newsletter probably saw “Grants to Expand Substance Abuse Treatment Capacity In Adult, Juvenile, and Family Drug Courts,” which offers funding “to expand and/or enhance substance abuse treatment services in existing adult, juvenile, and family “problem solving” courts which use the treatment drug court model in order to provide alcohol and drug treatment.”

Creating “‘problem solving’ courts” is another way of saying that conventional drug prohibition has failed, and conventional courts are a poor means of dealing with drugs. According to SAMHSA, they don’t solve problems; they are at best neutral, or they actually create problems. If they solved problems, we wouldn’t need new courts to solve problems.

Conventional courts, in other words, exacerbate the negative societal outcomes that drug laws impose or encourage. Right now, we’ve got a self-reinforcing legal system, because becoming involved in that system will ruin your life because the system itself will ruin your life for you.

SAMHSA realizes this to some extent. By funding “Grants to Expand Substance Abuse Treatment Capacity In Adult, Juvenile, and Family Drug Courts,” a combination of SAMHSA staffers and Congress are implicitly admitting that drug prohibition doesn’t work, and the enforcement effort behind prohibition doesn’t work. This is fairly obvious to anyone involved in the system, or anyone who has seen the movie Traffic and read Daniel Okrent’s brilliant book Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Or anyone who has read articles like “The global war on drugs has cost billions and taken countless lives — but achieved little. The scant results finally have politicians and experts joining calls for legalization.”

We, as a society, had the good sense to give up on Vietnam and now Afghanistan. Vietnam is now trying to join the global economy. The crazy system built around the “War on Drugs” helps no one except people employed as prison guards* and in other enforcement capacities. The money that we currently direct to prisons and police could be directed to treatment and prevention, while the black-market transactions that currently take place on street corners could take place in Rite-Aids and be taxed.

While I wouldn’t recommend that friends starting snorting coke every weekend, there are plenty of functional alcoholics and addicts out there. Alcoholism or drug abuse aren’t attractive lifestyles to me, but some people live them, and the second- and third-order effects of trying to stop those people are worse than the problems those people might cause by indulging in drugs or booze.

(Another note: there was $2,500,000 for this program in 2010 and almost $13,000,000 available now. This could be an example of random program funding drift, or it could say something about current federal priorities.)


* California’s guards are particularly pernicious, as “Fading are the peacemakers: One of California’s most powerful political forces may have peaked” and “Big Labor’s Lock ‘Em Up Mentality: How otherwise progressive unions stand in the way of a more humane correctional system” demonstrate. These problems are well-known to California policy wonks but too little known among everyone else.

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Meaning Well is Not Enough: The Role of Research in Grant Writing and Proposals

Chances are good that you, as an applicant, have really wonderful intentions in whatever you’re doing—just like everyone else. You want to help kids succeed, make the world a better place, save the endangered sparrow dragonfly,* impart job training skills, build cool stuff, etc. You know this is a excellent use of time and money. The trick is convincing others that your idea is an excellent use of their time and money.**

Usually you convince them by saying that the target area needs whatever you’re proposing and that what you’re proposing will be effective. To really convince the others with money, you can’t merely say that you know what you’re talking about and therefore they should give you the money. You need to present some kind of research that demonstrates your approach is effective. Merely asserting that your approach will be effective isn’t enough.

Lots of our clients don’t have any research to demonstrate that what they’re doing or want to do might be useful, which means we spend a lot of time conducting research. This probably brings back memories of high school term papers and the like. However tedious or difficult research might be, it’s still necessary if you’re going to have a strong application that sets you a part from others.

Here’s why: funders want to think you know what you’re doing. One way is to show that you know what’s going on in the field and that your project is likely to succeed. Some RFPs even tell you what research to cite and which protocols to use. For example, this year’s SAMHSA Offender Reentry Program (ORP) tells you to use a whole grab bag worth of acronyms (“you are encouraged, when appropriate for your setting and population to implement the Adolescent Community Reinforcement Approach (A-CRA) coupled with Assertive Continuing Care (ACC) and/or Motivational Enhancement Therapy/Cognitive Behavioral Therapy-5 (MET/CBT-5) with juvenile offenders”).

Most RFPs don’t make things this easy, and you have to do your own research. Still, for most human and social service proposals, you also don’t need to write a dissertation: it’s enough to sprinkle some peer-reviewed research in like paprika over a casserole. As Homer Simpson says, “Facts are meaningless! You can use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true!” The same applies to research. You need to have enough citations to make what you’re doing appear plausible, at least in most cases; for specific research grants or technology projects, you’ll often need someone who is really a domain expert. But for social and human service projects, you usually don’t.

That being said, people make two big mistakes in research for most kinds of grants: too much and too little. The “too much” mistake is less common, but it can happen when a RFP gets released on a short deadline and an applicant agency spends two weeks conducting research, finds a huge amount of material, and then can’t assemble it in an efficient manner to draft a concise and coherent needs assessment.

The “too little” mistake is one we see more frequently: the organization doesn’t have any research or citations whatsoever to demonstrate that their approach is likely to be valid (fortunately, this is an issue we can remedy). For RFPs that require a lot of research, this can be enough to get your proposal thrown out. Teen pregnancy prevention RFPs, for example, usually require a lot of research because of their politically charged nature. They require research even when that research indicates the approach is not likely to succeed, in which case you still need to pretend like the approach will succeed and the research is valid—in other words, you need to focus on the proposal world.

Don’t make either mistake. Use enough research to make your proposal palatable, even if “enough” varies a lot by application. Alas: there’s no real way to gauge how much is enough except through experience, which one uses to judge RFPs on a case-by-case basis. When in doubt, however, cite too much rather than too little.


* Note: this is a made up critter.

** Convincing others doesn’t just apply to funders—it can also apply to potential partners and collaborators. One problem with collaborations that we didn’t mention in our post on the subject is that collaborating agencies might not care about your problem. Sure, the local school district wants, in the abstract, for your mentoring program to succeed. But they already have lots of responsibilities, lots of administrators, and lots of problems, and they get paid average daily attendance (ADA) money whether you get the grant or not. They might care, but not as much as they care about their primary mission.