NEW! You can now search hundreds of links to potential funders, including federal & state agencies, private foundations, health charities, corporate philanthropies and professional
societies. SEARCH THIS SITE
FEDERAL FUNDERS
For researchers in health fields, there are several primary
sources of information about federal funding:
The National Institutes
of Health (NIH) is the largest supporter
of biomedical research in the world. New opportunities and priorities for
NIH funding are announced every Friday in the NIH
Guide to Grants and Contracts. A search facility is available
at this link to make keyword searches for previously-issued Program Announcements
back to 1992, and to download the full text of current PA's, RFA's and
RFP's (for a discussion of the differences among them, see PA's,
RFA's & RFP's).
Several significant federal agencies announce grant opportunities
in the Federal Register, published every day the federal
government is open for business. Notices from the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention,
the Health Resources and Services Administration, the
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the Agency
for Children and Families, and the Department
of Education (for grants related to disabilities and rehabilitation)
are all first published here.
Direct electronic access to the Federal Register has become
both easy and free. You can search
the Federal Register through the Government Printing Office and download
the announcements you find.
A word or two about Federal Register searches:
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If you expect to be applying to the agencies listed above
you are well advised to make searching the Federal Register a weekly habit.
Many times the grant opportunities announced therein allow a turnaround
time of a month or less. If you don't see a given announcement until a
week or more after it comes out (or not until it's published in the monthly
newsletter) you may not have time to prepare a viable application. In any
case, your competitors for the grant, who are all searching electronically,
will have seen it and begun their preparations sooner than you did.
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When making a search, try not to use extremely broad categories.
In the Federal Register, a word like "grant" or "health" may come up hundreds
of times in a week. Your search using these key words will bring back way
too many items. To limit the search:
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Set the date range back only a week or so, or since your
last search.
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Call up the tables of contents first (choose "Contents and
Preliminary Pages" as the category and limit the time period in which you
are searching). Write down the page number for anything that looks interesting,
and then use that number as the keyword in a subsequent search.
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Use the agency name and "awards" as your keyword phrases.
Catalog
of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) lists all ongoing
authorized federal grant programs, and can be searched by topic area. The
CFDA will not tell you about current availability of funds or current application
deadlines for these programs, but it can give you some guidance on the
programs each agency is authorized to fund. If there is a program listed
in the CFDA you are especially interested in, call an agency contact and
ask if there are plans for making any new funds available for it in the
next year.
Finally, many announcements of federal contract opportunities
(Requests for Proposals or RFP's) first appear in Commerce
Business Daily. For an explanation of the kind of funding
opportunities announced in the CBD, see RFAs, RFPs and
PAs.
If the acronyms used for various federal health agencies
have you confused, consult the Acronymic Guide to
the Public Health Service
Many other federal agencies that fund health related projects
have sites on the Web. Some of them are:
Other information on federal funding can be found via:
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GrantsNet,
for Department of Health and Human Services grants;
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A keyword search of state and federal funding opportunities
has been provided by the state of Texas at State
and Federal Grants
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USING UNIVERSITY LINKS
Most university grants offices maintain Web sites
to help their faculty find grants. Some of these services can be very useful
to people outside their institutions as well. You are urged to browse through
them and book-mark any that you might want to revisit while making your
own fund-searching rounds.
One of the best university sites is maintained by
TRAM,
a consortium of research administrators. The site originated in Texas but
is now hosted by Arizona State. Here you will find downloadable
federal application Forms
formatted for PC's or Mac's, links to many university grants-related Web
sites, links to a wide variety of funding agencies, and a great deal more.
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FINDING PRIVATE FUNDING SOURCES
When seeking funding from a foundation you must do a certain
amount of market research to find the foundations with priorities that
closely match your project. Until recently, the most comprehensive way
to start this search was by browsing the Foundation Directory or the Directory
of Illinois Foundations (both available in the Research Development Resource
Room, 603 Durand). With information gleaned from a directory, you would
write or phone a number of foundations and ask for copies of their annual
reports and guidelines for applications.
Now the internet has made some of this legwork unnecessary.
You can use the search engine on this web site,
which has links to find several hundred private foundations, corporate
funders, professional societies, and health charities.
Another site with information on local foundations is
offered by the Donors Forum
of Chicago. This site also allows you to search
for descriptions of recent grants – since 1994 – using a number of categories
or the names of funders or recipients. It will not link you directly to
foundation web sites, but does give enough information to narrow your list
of potential funding agencies.
Another good search site is the Foundation
Center Directory of Grantmakers.
This will link you to many foundations, as well as to corporate and
public charities. Each links page has a keyword search engine for
recent grants. The Foundation Center offers quite a lot of online information
about grants strategy and application writing as well. The
Chronicle of Philanthropy also offers a search engine for upcoming
deadlines in the private funding arena.
AAAS/Howard Hughes
Grantsnet was set up by the American Association for the Advancement
of Science and the Howard Hughes Medical to facilitate the search
for funding by new investigators in biomedical fields. You will be asked
to register, but the service is free, and it does carry out a fairly exhaustive
search using your key words. This is one of the few sites which catalogues
the many small grants for new investigators offered by professional societies.
Some additional databases with information about private
funding sources, including those not on line are:
For more information on seeking private funding, see How
to Approach a Foundation.
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STATE & LOCAL FUNDING
Affiliates of the Cook County Bureau of Health Services receive
a great deal of external support from block grants
and
other federal pass-through grants to state and city governments. Most of
these are administered by State agencies such as the Illinois Department
of Human Services or the Department of Public Health, which can be found
in the index to Illinois
State Agencies. State funding opportunities are typically
announced by individual RFA's sent to likely applicants. If you hope to
pursue state funding, you should contact the relevant agencies and ask
to be put on their mailing lists for RFA's.
The City of Chicago also offers or administers funding
in a variety of areas. Offices and program areas are described in the site
for the Chicago Department
of Public Health. As with the State, notices of funding opportunities
from the City are mailed to potentially interested parties. If you are
potentially interested , you should request that you receive mailings from
the appropriate departments.
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Read the latest CCBHS Grants Newsletter
Send comments to ord@cchil.org
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