The most informative pages of this RFA will be the ones that discuss the overview of the grant. This will tell you who is eligible, the background of the program and the purpose of the funding. It should provide all the necessary information you need to know in order to know if your school/program will be a good fit for this grant. If you still have questions about your eligibility ( and even if you don't), I suggest calling the program officer/contact for the grant and telling him/her about your school and program.
After your computer downloads what is most likely a very extensive file, open that sucker up. There will usually be multiple pages of Table of Contents, but I'd like you to bypass that for now. The page that lives behind the Table of Contents, usually named "Critical Dates," which might make you feel like you're in critical condition, as it should. Take this page and paste it somewhere you will see it every single day. These dates are not suggestions. They are the difference between funding your pet project and seeing all your hard work go to waste.
Critical Dates
If there is a webinar, conference call or meeting scheduled in this list, attend it. This session is comparable to those review sessions college professors hold where they tell you what they're really planning for the final exam. If you missed this webinar/conference call/meeting, call up the program officer and ask if there were any materials handed out. He/she may even have a transcript of the questions asked and answered.
If there is a submission deadline for an Intent to Apply, go through the Table of Contents and find the Intent to Apply section and pull the information and the form. Determine what information you will need and who you will need to speak with to get that information. You have to work quickly with government grants to ensure you don't miss any deadlines.
Application Process
This section will provide the nuts and bolts information for your grant application. It will give you application instructions and submission instructions. Skim this section for now and go back to it a week before the application is due. Don't leave it until the last minute because something always comes up.
Core Application Narrative
This section is extremely important - it's like your MLA handbook for your grant application. It will tell you the format it should be in and should tell you what information you need to include. The first time you go through this section, make notes of information you will need to collect from outside sources. After reading through it a second time, create a timeline for the collection of that information and the writing of individual portions of the grant. This will keep you accountability to yourself and the grant application. Share that timeline with other members of your "team."
Rubric
The rubric is a big signifier of exactly what the grantmakers want from you - the close you adhere to the rubric, the closer you are to scoring very well on the grant. This same rubric will be used by the people who are scoring your grant during the Peer Review Process. In that blog post, I talk about the subjectivity of the grant scoring process. Therefore, the closer you adhere to the rubric, the less wiggle-room there is in the scoring.
Take, for example, the rubric for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers grant:
The rubric is split into four sections: Advanced, Adequate, Limited, and Minimal. In the advanced column of the "Community Needs Assessment" section, it reads:
"Thoroughly assesses and identifies the unmet need for the proposed program and convincingly describes how the program will address community needs. thoroughly documents in detail, school demographics, the number and percentage of schools eligible for Title I, the number and percentages of students eligible for FRPMs, a estimate of students performing below academic grade level, attendance and truancy rates, API, juvenile crime rates (if available), and the average hours of attendance per students."If you planned ahead and Prepared Your School and have done the research to fully Understand Your School, then you will have already answered these questions before you even found this grant rubric. Piece of cake. Note how much of an "advanced" score is based on numbers. If you are thorough and technical in your assessment, you'll probably score higher.
The rubric has sectons for the Program Elements, Enrichment, Family Literacy and Educational services, Collaboration and Partnerships, Program Administration, Sustainability Plan, Capacity for Effective Evaluation, all identifying key traits that the grantmaker's are looking for in a winning grant. It's a long rubric (which can make matters more difficult for you, the grantwriter), but all rubrics vary in size and specificity.
Attachments, Letters of Agreement, and Morandums of Understanding
Although government grants generally impose a page limit, the number of attachments you have to send in can easily double or triple that. Attachments are a messy business - where you'll most likely find the mistakes in your grant, if you look hard enough (and trust me, the grant readers most certainly will). When you reference an attachment in your grant, the reader will go looking for it, so make sure it's actually there.
Letters of Agreement are the physical proof of collaborations and partnerships that will make you event/program possible, but are usually reserved to voluntary commitments and in-kind contributions -- your manpower and community.
Morandums of Understanding (often referred to as MOUs) are for paid services. This should be viewed as a contract between a partnering organization that will provide staff, services, facilities, and equipment for a fee. These should be very explicit and outline the roles and responsibilities of all individuals and businesses involved. It should estimate the monetary value of such contributions.
Scoring Process
Government grants go through a Peer Review Scoring Process. Read this blog post to find out more.
Application Package Checklist
And finally, the holy grail of grants -- the checklist. Just like Santa, check that list twice -- or twelve -- times before finally sealing that envelope or hitting that "submit" button or freeing that messenger pigeon (not suggested).
0 comments:
Post a Comment