One of the most difficult things with grant writing is simply knowing about all of the good opportunities out there. Between federal, state, and local RFPs being released every day, the chances missing something useful for your agency or clients is unhappily high. That’s why for California state departments, Stan and I actually pulled together the grant funding pages for over 25 departments. It has made it easier to regularly check for updates and new funding as it is released. But even with our handy list of links, it is onerous checking for opportunities on 25 different websites every few weeks.
So that’s why it is such exciting news if you are a grantseeker in California – this month the state unveiled its brand new California Grants Portal. Well, it is exciting for grant nerds like us, and we hope if you live or work in California it is for you as well.
The new Grants Portal brings together billions of dollars in funding opportunities from across every single state department. This now makes competitive state grants searchable in one place for the first time – a dramatic improvement over our previous method of doing a search every other week in each state website that feature grant opportunities.
This is especially good news for nonprofits and agencies that are smaller and have less development capacity to do extensive searches like that regularly.
The California Grants Portal was created through the Grant Information Act of 2018 that required the State Library to develop a centralized repository for funding opportunities. The State Library completed stakeholder engagement with grantseekers and grantmakers to make it user-friendly.
So far Stan and I like the search features and have found we can more quickly identify relevant opportunities for our clients. As of today (July 28, 2020, about two weeks into its launch), there are 133 current grant opportunities that total more than $18 billion.
Check it out today!
