How to Determine Eligibility for Federal Funding Opportunities

Determining your eligibility for federal grants is an important first step in the federal grant application process.

Funding opportunity eligibility requirements are defined by legislation and federal agency policies. To receive a grant, you must meet an opportunity’s eligibility requirements.

Here are some tips for finding federal funding opportunities for which you may be eligible:

What Is the Difference Between Grants.gov and Benefits.gov?

This blog post was first published in 2017 and updated on April 1, 2020.

Grants.gov regularly receives a significant amount of queries from users hoping to apply for personal financial assistance from the federal government. These individuals might be looking for home repair grants or forms of disability assistance.

Others are unfortunately driven to Grants.gov by scam artists posing as agents of Grants.gov (or some made-up variant) who promise “free government grants” in exchange for monthly fees or gift cards.

Federal Funding Spotlight – Ten of the Most Viewed FOAs of 2019

Every month, hundreds of federal funding opportunity announcements (FOAs) are published on Grants.gov. The programs represented range widely across categories like space science, healthcare, law enforcement, job training, human rights, climate change and much, much more.

In this post, we highlight ten of the most-viewed funding opportunity announcements from 2019. (Note: Some of these opportunities have already closed and are no longer accepting applications.)

These ten FOAs are reflective of the vast array of opportunities published on Grants.gov every week. If you’d like to keep up with the funding opportunity announcements posted on Grants.gov, you can create saved searches for each area of interest. You will be notified when an opportunity matching your interest is published.

Federal Funding Spotlight: Open Opportunities in Science and Technology

This week’s edition of Federal Funding Spotlight contains a curated list of open opportunities in the fields of science and technology, including opportunities from the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Department of Defense and the Department of Commerce.

Click here for a list of the latest funding opportunity announcements published on Grants.gov.

Centers of Research Excellence in Science and Technology (CREST) and HBCU Research Infrastructure for Science and Engineering (HBCU-RISE)

• National Science Foundation | Current Closing Date for Applications: December 6, 2019
• The Centers of Research Excellence in Science and Technology (CREST) program provides support to enhance the research capabilities of minority-serving institutions (MSI) through the establishment of centers that effectively integrate education and research.

 

Federal Funding Spotlight: Opportunities from USAID, National Science Foundation & More

This week’s edition of Federal Funding Spotlight 🔦 features opportunities from the Department of the Interior, Department of Energy, USAID, and the National Science Foundation.

Not-for-Profit Acid Mine Drainage Watershed Cooperative Agreement (WCAP) Programs

Department of the Interior, Office of Surface Mining | Current Closing Date for Applications: September 30, 2019

The Not-for-Profit, Acid Mine Drainage (AMD) Reclamation – Watershed Cooperative Agreement Program (WCAP) aims to restore streams affected by AMD to a level that will support a diverse biological community and provide recreational opportunities for  communities.

Spotlight: Recent Federal Funding Opportunities Open to State Governments

This edition of Federal Funding Spotlight features a list of recent opportunities open to state government applicants. The programs discussed below aim to:

• Expand public understanding of the connections between music and wellness;
• Make research contributions in the area of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias;
• Address the problems fish and wildlife will face in the future;
• Help communities and regions devise and implement long-term economic recovery strategies.

Federal Funding Spotlight: Twitter Edition

In this edition of Federal Funding Spotlight, we are highlighting recent Grants.gov tweets about open funding opportunities from the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and more.

Click the link below each tweet for a full list of the agency’s current open funding opportunities on Grants.gov.

Federal Funding 🔦 Spotlight: New Opportunities Supporting Public Health

This week’s edition of Federal Funding Spotlight 🔦 focuses on new opportunities from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) supporting:

• National public health laboratories internationally
• Research into Alzheimer’s-Disease-Related Dementias
• Outstanding graduate students recognized for a strong interest in pursuing careers as independent cancer researchers, and more.

The Latest in Federal Grants: Entrepreneurship Training for Veterans, Micro-Enterprise Support for Native American Firms & More

This week’s edition of Federal Funding Spotlight 🔦  focuses on opportunities from the Small Business Administration, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Defense. These opportunities support…

• Entrepreneurship training for service-disabled veterans
• Cooperative research involving commercial and recreational fishermen
• Natural resource conservation practices throughout West Virginia, and more!

Visit Grants.gov to browse and search through a complete list of federal funding opportunity announcements.

 

Service Disabled Veteran Entrepreneurship Training Program

Small Business Administration 🔦  Current Closing Date for Applications: July 24, 2019 

This program supports entrepreneurship training to veteran small business owners and entrepreneurs, with a special emphasis on entrepreneurship instruction to service-disabled veteran small business owners and entrepreneurs.

What Is Federal Financial Assistance? [Updated]

This post was originally published on April 17, 2017 and updated on July 3, 2019.

Federal financial assistance is the transfer of anything of value, most often money, from a federal agency to a non-federal entity.

In the most general sense, federal financial assistance is a tool the government uses to serve public purposes as defined by Congress.

Federal financial assistance is a very broad term, and it can take on a variety of more precise forms.

• One of the most common forms is a grant, which we write about quite often on this blog.
• Other examples of federal financial assistance include cooperative agreements, donations of property, direct appropriations, food commodities, loans, interest subsidies, and insurance.
• Each type of federal financial assistance serves different purposes and has different legal and regulatory frameworks that govern how that specific assistance can be used.