S1 E26 Special Dine In Episode with Fielding Jezreel. Today’s Specials: Federal Grants, Funding Trends & What Grantseekers Need to Know

And I'd like to go a little bit deeper into organizational readiness because Carrie and I are both big proponents of ensuring that the organizations that we work with are ready for all levels of grant funding.

And we know with federal funding, over the past year and a half, we have seen federal grants delayed, frozen, terminated, then reinstated, uh, now litigated.

And I saw a report last week that estimates that as much as $177 billion in federal funding has been cut across all 50 states.

Yes.

Um, and that's from, I saw that on the Associated Press.

So with those couple of things in mind, and there's o- other complicated layers, what are you doing any differently, if anything, than you were before 2025? And what do you see now as some of the most important things to help organizations become grant ready?

So I would like to say, and I have been tempted to say many times over the last, I don't know, uh, what's it been? 20 months or so, that I think we're through the worst of it, right? I keep wanting to say like, we're not gonna see the big, the big cuts anymore.

We're, we're sort of on track, right? And we have seen with the new proposed OMB language that we're try- that this administration is gonna try to codify the ability to sort of tear back grants whenever administration pleases.

So there are certainly some potential challenges that would come with those, those proposed OMB changes.

I am hopeful that Congress steps in and says, "This is outside of the scope of what any administration should be able to do." Um, but, but we're in sort of a wait and see at this point.

I think there are really three big differences, and I'm gonna try to remember all three [chuckles] um, now that I've said there are three.

So one is, there is absolutely additional risk involved, right? So whereas before, if you received a three-year grant, you, you'd have to mess up pretty good to not get your money, right? You'd have to either not spend any of it, have to be so far behind in your metrics you'd never catch up.

You'd have to do something like fraud and get caught.

I mean, just like, it was hard to sort of lose your grant in the, you know, in the middle of a multi-year grant.

That now is something I plan for with clients.

And one of the, it's, it's entered the go, no go decision-making conversation.

And so my question is often some version of, if you got this grant for one year instead of three, is it still worth our time and investment in this opportunity? Because if that passes and we see an administration change in two years, well, a new administration could take on that, that new, you know, that new option to sort of cancel grants that no longer fit the, the priorities of, of the administration or that department.

The second area I talk about a lot is, what is your cash on hand? What is your runway? Because the approval process for a first time grantee for getting a reimbursement has gone up significantly.

So we've gone from, you know, it, it's always a little bit rocky in the beginning.

It's pretty rare to get a federal grant and immediately get your first reimbursement one month in, everything's fine, right? I mean, that, it's a, it's a little, there's a lot of bureaucracy.

There's, there's a lot of red tape.

A lot of people have to click boxes, right? And, and that assumes that you have someone on staff who has done this before and knows what this process is gonna look like.

So I'm now telling clients that they need a four months on hand to really feel secure in receiving a grant award, and then being able to actually carry out the activities before you've received that first reimbursement.

Now, that is not to say you won't get your money faster, but that's kind of the, the way that I'm helping them deal with the potential risk.

The third thing I have dealt with a lot this year, a lot of my clients, so because I try to work with organizations that are led by the communities that they are serving, a lot of my clients fall into the DEI or DEI adjacent categories, right? And so I have, you know, one of the big conversations that I have had with all of those clients, obviously at this point, but then anyone new who comes and says, "Hey, can you write this one-off grant for me?" Is we have to have some really hard conversations about who they serve, how they talk about who they serve, and their comfort level with eliminating language that is gonna make them a target for automatic exclusion, right? We're not even gonna get to the review process.