This article, " ‘The EPA needs to humble itself’: why some US non-profits are turning down agency funds," in the Guardian makes a good point that government grants come with a variety of requirements that often exceed the capacity of nonprofits to manage and comply with.
I joked on a grant I ran that was via the Federal Historic Preservation Fund, that if you don't do it right, you end up in Leavenworth. DC Government grants were similarly problematic with lengthy reporting requirements, and allowed them to cancel grants with two weeks notice. In Baltimore County, the county found it wasn't worth applying for Safe Routes to Schools money because of the reporting requirements. They figured it was cheaper to just spend their own money on sidewalk and other improvements.
This is true with a lot of government related grants to property owners for commercial district revitalization work, especially facades, or a program in SF to help business owners whose properties are damaged from vandalism but gives paltry amounts ("San Francisco restaurants grapple with vandalism," San Francisco Chronicle).
Elements of a facade of a historic commercial building
City of Creedmoor, North Carolina
The grants are relatively small, and the application and reporting procedures are onerous. When I worked on a facade program in Takoma DC, the Main Street group actually did most of the applications and project management, making the program work for the businesses.
Earlier, in a facade program in Brookland, we screwed up, because some work was performed before the grants were awarded, and therefore, couldn't be reimbursed, abetted by the slowness of the grant process.
That's the kind of assistance that often needs to be provided. But isn't. Although, understandably with larger federal grants, there are a lot of provisions wrt accountability, bidding, etc., that the public demands.
From the article:
Local advocates wanted to monitor the air quality outside the school to help administrators figure out the safest times to let the kids play outside. “Most of these sites are completely unmonitored,” said Micah Parkin, the executive director of the non-profit 350 Colorado.
She applied for an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant aimed at helping communities monitor their own air quality and was thrilled when her organization was selected to receive roughly $500,000.
But Parkin and her colleagues quickly ran into hurdles. The EPA wanted her team to hold a competitive bidding process to find a local partner, even though 350 Colorado had already identified one: the air-quality monitoring firm Boulder Air. They also demanded financial information that Parkin said would require 350 Colorado to overhaul its accounting and reporting procedures. These processes required time and resources that 350 Colorado, with an annual budget of under $1m, simply didn’t have.
In late 2023, after months of conference calls and untold amounts of paperwork, Parkin and her board made the difficult decision to turn down the money. “I kept saying: ‘Let’s just get this done – come on, people.’” she recalled. “But it became clear to me that there was no end in sight.”
...Near Denver, the community organization Cultivando also turned down a half-million dollar grant to monitor pollution in a largely Hispanic community near a petroleum refinery. The group had previously found high levels of radioactive particles and PM2.5, which is associated with increased incidence of respiratory problems, among other problems.
Cultivando had planned to hire Boulder Air, the same air-quality consulting firm that Colorado 350 intended to work with. But like Colorado 350, Cultivando wasn’t equipped to carry out the competitive bidding process required before they sign on Boulder Air, executive director Olga Gonzalez said.
“I was actually shocked that they didn’t know more” about how community-based organizations operate, she said. “The EPA needs to really humble itself and think about what it means to partner with community-led efforts.”
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