With most schools officially on summer vacation, now is the perfect time for developing projects and mapping out a grant strategy for the coming months. As many grant programs for educational institutions involve significant collaboration, the summer months can provide time for creating relationships and beginning dialogue with potential grant partners.

If you are paying close attention to the health care funding landscape, a new phrase and abbreviation has entered the grants lexicon. Many opportunities being released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are being prefaced with "Affordable Care Act" or "ACA". Apparently, this is the consensus designation for grants authorized through the health reform legislation, or the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that was signed into law on March 23, 2010. The ACA has authorized several grant programs over the next decade to address workforce development and professional shortages in the health arena, improve health care quality overall, and fund the deployment of comprehensive care management delivery models.

The grants world is full of any number of variables that must be defined. To which grant program should I apply? How much time do I have for proposal development? Is there a need for collaboration? Will my project fit into the eligible expenses of the grant program?

These are a few of the many grant questions for which grant answers are necessary. By developing a familiarity with the funding opportunities and an understanding of how the system works, you will quickly begin to address some of these gaps.

In the shadow of the recently closed Investing in Innovation (i3) grant program, the importance of collaborative projects and clear partner agreements remain vital pieces of a grantseeking and project development phase. This particular program involved the possibility of collaborative efforts, and documentation of these collaborations was required for this type of engagement.