Grant Opportunities
SUSTAINABILITY OR CONTINUANCE COMPONENT
This is a very difficult component to address in a grant but here are a couple of tips:
- Draw from your partner agencies/organizations in the grant. In the course of your preparing the grant discuss with your partner agencies/organizations their potential contributions including in-kind, matching, or cash.
- Include a trainer component that will give you local expertise to continue at a lower cost.
- Think in terms of all of in-kind contributions that you are putting into the grant, which you do not have in the budget. This is the local capacity you will have to help continue the program. Put a dollar figure on every contribution from office supplies to volunteer time (use minimum wage or hourly rate of aides from your pay scale) that contribute to the program implementation. It is surprising how these add up to your commitment to project continuation.
- Consider developing a sliding fee scale to continue the project as a whole or individual program activities.
- Look outside of the educational funding stream for support of programs and/or program activities, have fundraising events during the original program implementation.
- Include communications in the program - the more people who know about your project and its purpose; the more sources there are for in-kind or cash contributions.
TIPS
When writing grants, be creative in defining "high need" to increase your district's competitiveness for funding, which the district might not be eligible for otherwise. Think "student need." Effective strategies include:
- Look at all of your district and building subgroups
- Select a target audience
- Communicate with stakeholders. Send out a valid, research-based question and use the results to establish your need and also to serve as one of your grant's performance objectives. This link can help in developing the question Developing A Research Question.
- Look for a "high need" district to partner with to apply. You do this by checking their data on the ODE website, and
- Look for opportunity to "bend" the grant guidelines a bit, but not 90 degrees.
Critical Numbers
There are four “critical numbers” to have at hand when preparing grant applications. The district’s:
1) Taxpayer identification number referred to as either EIN# or TIN# Source—Department of Internal Revenue Services
2) IRN# Source-Ohio Department of Education
3) DUNS# This is a unique nine digit identification number, for each physical location of your business. Source—Dun & Bradstreet
4) NCES locator number Source—National Center for Education Statistics
LANGUAGE
In any State/Federal RFP, there are strict requirements for proposal submission. The RFP (Request for Proposal) guidelines tell you exactly what you need to do and how to get it done. Use their outline; it's like doing an exam with extended answers.
Above all be cognizant of the language of these guidelines and make sure that you echo this language in your proposal. For example if the RFP uses the term "population of focus" rather than "target population", you use "population of focus" even though you are accustomed to using target population. If RFP says "goals" but in your eyes these are objectives, you say "goals"; if the RFP refers to "outcomes" rather than objectives, you refer to "outcomes".
The reviewers use a scoring rubric prepared by the same people who prepare the RFP guidelines, and the reviewers who look at each proposal don't go through them word by word--they look for the key areas that the RFP highlights. So you need to be on the same page and speak the same language.
If you have any questions, please contact
Judy Kestner, Grants Writer/Administrator,
ext. 265 or tesc_kestner [at] tccsa [dot] net.
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