On September 20, 2018, what appears to be the last group (or almost the last group!) of Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs) for Designation Renewal System (DRS) Round 7 posted to grants.gov. There are now 140 open competitions for Head Start/Early Head Start grants. A handful of forecasts remain on grants.gov for which FOAs have not yet posted. It’s been a few days now since any FOAs have gone up, so it’s hard to say if or when the FOAs for the remaining forecasts will go live.
There are two main ways you can access information about the open competitions. Go to grants.gov and search for the grant in your service area. Or, visit the Funding Opportunity Announcements page of the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) website. Under “By Program Office,” select Office of Head Start. From there, find your grant and you can download the FOA.
We’ve been watching the FOAs go live over the course of the last week. While the date the FOAs posted differs by a day or two, the application due date for all of the DRS Round 7 applications is November 19, 2018.
As we shared in an earlier blog post, the DRS Round 7 FOAs are the same as DRS Round 6 (with the exception of minor formatting and wording changes). Content, requirements, and evaluation criteria are unchanged. Proposals will include seven core sections of narrative, and the points allocated to each section is as follows:
- Demonstration of Need: Location, Population, and Service Delivery Options (20 points)
- Achieving Early Learning and Development Outcomes to Promote School Readiness for Children (30 points)
- Past Performance (20 points)
- Staffing and Supporting a Strong Early Learning Workforce (20 points)
- Planning and Implementation (15 points)
- Organizational Capacity and Governance (25 points)
- Budget and Budget Justification (20 points)
Looking for guidance on how to make your grant writing process as smooth as possible? Check out some of our tips for success.
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