It has always been said that children are the future and foundations are increasingly following this motto and including youth in their grantmaking decisions. Youth grantmaker subdivisions that allow local community youth to be actively involved in projects are popping up more and more. Some are smaller groups like the ones that are part of the Winston-Salem Foundation and the Greater Salina Community Foundation and others are much larger like the Council of Michigan Foundations' Youth Grantmakers program.

As predicted, the federal government was able to bypass a complete catastrophe and avoided taking the United States down the fiscal cliff.  Unfortunately, when it comes to planning for grant programs likely to be available over the remainder of Fiscal Year 2013, we are left with the status quo of continued uncertainty.  In fact, besides extending and making permanent the Bush Era tax cuts for the majority of Americans, the fiscal cliff deal essentially punted every other major impending decision to March 2013.  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell alludes to three major impending financial crises that converge in March...

On January 7, 2013, the Federal Communications Commission announced a new funding program that will make up to $400 million available annually to support modern telemedicine initiatives by providing a discount on high speed broadband service to providers. The program, entitled the "Healthcare Connect Fund," is designed to build on the FCC's Rural Healthcare pilot program and will transform the Commission's healthcare-related broadband initiative into a permanent support fixture.

While each grant proposal will have its own set of specific guidelines and required supporting documents, grant writers can save a lot of time (and probably spare some headaches) by maintaining a "Frequently Used" file of the most commonly-requested supporting documents and materials. Depending on the type of programs to which your organization typically applies for funding, your list may vary from the one below.  However, determining which documents to file and keeping the files up to date can smooth out the proposal development process for several different grants and, if you find yourself pinched for time, can mean the difference between a high-quality, successful submission and an unsatisfactory or incomplete proposal.

The President proposes $1.6 billion in new tax revenue, extending payroll tax cut, $50 billion of spending on infrastructure projects and complete executive control of the debt ceiling borrowing limit.  In addition, the President's proposal called for $400-600 billion in spending cuts that are not completely delineated.

Are you having a difficult time trying to find active grants for which you can apply? Depending on the time of the year, there may not be any current deadlines for grants programs in which you are interested.  Don't let this discourage you. By taking a proactive approach, it can mean you have plenty of time to prepare for deadlines that may be coming down the road.

For organizations engaged in projects designed to benefit communities, distilling the overall impact of that project into a list of concrete and measurable objectives can prove challenging. Unlike profitable businesses, nonprofit organizations and public entities are not necessarily wired to produce a clean-cut demonstration of return on investment for their projects. However, with grant dollars dwindling while community needs continue to increase, funders are looking for increasingly empirical data to demonstrate that their money is being well spent. In the examples below, a few average (or worse) project objectives are diagnosed and treated with a good dose of specificity. While these examples are purely fictional, the methods used to improve them can be used for a variety of grant applications.

Due to their nature, foundations are always changing who and what they fund. They are independent from the legislature that governs federal and state grant programs and, to some extent, have the liberty to do what they please. According to the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), foundation grants to empower poor and needy communities have increased recently. Giving has steadily increased to populations such as disadvantaged people, the elderly, women, girls and other groups since 2004. The executive director of NRCP, Aaron Dorfman, stated, “We’re seeing slow but steady progress in a positive direction. The data suggests that our nation’s grant-making foundations may be realizing that they can achieve their missions more effectively and also serve the common good by prioritizing and empowering those with the least wealth, opportunity and power.”

Many people have reached out to help Hurricane Sandy Victims in the wake of the tragedy.

On November 8, 2012, the Department of Education announced the third round of potential awardees for the Investing in Innovation (i3) competition, a grant program initiated during the Recovery Act of 2009 and awarding nearly $800 million during its two previous competitions in 2010 and 2011. As in previous competitions, the Department first announced the applicants with the highest scores. In order to receive funding, these applicants must secure the required matching amounts by December 7, 2012. Final awards will be announced by the end of the year and are expected to total more than $140M.