Anyone who's been involved with the grants process knows its one thing to find the right grant and another thing to actually submit an application. Once you go through the trials and tribulations of putting the application together, you have may have looked over the application hundreds of times, or you may not have had much time to look it over at all. In this economic state, organizations are downsizing and people are being asked to take on more and more tasks. This can hurt the quality of an application when the submitter doesn't have enough time to properly proofread the application before it is time to submit.

In the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, the nation’s collective quest for safety spawned a quick rise to prominence for U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Established in the Homeland Security Act of 2002, DHS supports the various security efforts and programs that contribute toward the broad yet vital mission to “secure the nation from the many threats we face.” But with the Fiscal Year 2012 Budget now solidified, many of those tasked with ensuring the nation’s security may be doing so with much less federal grant money in their pockets.

The start of the new year means big business for gyms and fitness clubs as overstuffed holiday revelers seek to atone for their overindulgence by resolving to get in shape and lose those extra pounds. Whether or not this year's flock will stick with their goals remains to be seen, but the beginning of the year is also a great time to think about getting your grant-seeking program in shape. Whether you have yet to embark on a quest for grant funding or are a weather-beaten veteran of the process, take this opportunity to rethink your strategies, or develop an entirely new one, and make 2012 your most successful grants year yet.

As would-be applicants to the Health Care Innovation Challenge across the country are learning, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services' monstrous $1 billion program aimed at innovating health care and payment models in an effort to save money is no walk in the park.
By December 19, 2011, CMS had received well over 10,000 letters of intent for the program. While a significant percentage of these LOIs will probably not result in full proposal submissions, interest in the program has been unsurprisingly overwhelming. With the January 27 deadline looming, project developers, writers, and other grants professionals are knee-deep in the murky program requirements, which call for a tightly-knit forty-page narrative and a complex total cost of care savings plan, among other elements.

By Stephen R. Galati, Contributing Writer
December 2011

When one thinks of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant programs and the risk of terrorist attacks, the first thought may be that government and public agencies are the primary targets. Although these agencies may hold higher visibility and threat risks, they are certainly not the only viable targets for acts of terrorism. Since the horrific attacks against the United States on September 11th, many nonprofit organizations, such as ones operating religious facilities and places of symbolic value, have become involved with infrastructure-hardening and emergency preparedness activities. The events of the last decade have served as a paradigm change in our collective understanding of national security.

By Christopher Haight
December 2011

Corporate philanthropy has long been a staple of the more socially-inclined aspects to running a company. Cash or in-kind donations to schools and nonprofits brings multiple benefits to the donor, including helping to make a positive contribution to the communities in which they do business, improving brand image and loyalty, and helping provide a small tax write-off.

Crowd-sourcing is largely enabled through cloud-based computing, where information, documents, and other materials are not stored locally on an individual's own computer, but are instead stored on a remote server and made accessible from any internet device. Cloud computing has rapidly been transforming the private and public sectors alike, as it helps make the sharing of information and applications more efficient.

To various degrees, the American people and regulatory bodies have always had an appreciation for humanity’s effect on nature’s well-being. Beginning in the late 1960s, and continuing today, we have successfully created numerous laws and expectations that formalize the notion that a federally-funded project to promote human progress must not come at the expense of environmental, historic, and cultural resources.

The health sector grant funding landscape is abuzz with excitement. The new Health Care Innovation Challenge program is providing $1 billion in funding for projects that offer innovations in service delivery and payment modeling. The primary target population for the funding are those individuals enrolled in CMS insurance programs, which includes Medicare, Medicaid, and Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP). While applicants can address other populations, the project will not be funded unless one of the three CMS-insured populations are incorporated at some level.

The underlying power of the internet has always been the connection of ideas and people without regard to temporal, physical, social, or other common restraints. Through this communicative ease provided by the internet, crowd-sourcing is becoming a prominent feature in many aspects of our lives. Crowd-sourcing is essentially the enabling of a mass collaboration of individuals to contribute to a task normally reserved for one individual or a set number of individuals. The most prominent example to date is Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia open to contributions and edits from anyone who chooses to participate.