As a recovery home owner, you should be applying for grants for additional funding to support your program. You provide your clients and communities with life changing services and impact. There are likely a range of available grants for your recovery home from your local community, county, state or even federal level.
Today we will review how you can get grant funding & best practices to be in position for grant writing requirements.
Step 1 – Make sure you have good record keeping & data:
Regardless of the organization you are applying for a grant from, they will all require some sort of reporting on your program’s specifics. Think of data points like your clients demographics, and your expenses.
Making sure you keep good records on all your clients’ profiles, your services, and your business expenses will come in handy when you are working on your grant package.
Common data points you’ll see asked in grant applications are:
- Number of program participants per year
- Average length of stay in your program
- Average number of participants in your program
- Zip codes your clients are coming from
- Age ranges for your clients
- Education levels of your clients
- Race or ethnicity of your clients
- Employment history / ranges
- Your monthly expenses
- What will you use the funding for
- What are some successes of your program
Depending on the funding source, you will be asked to provide similar information on your application. You will need to have the documentation to back up your data, so keeping clean records on this sort of information is really important. If you’re a One Step platform member, you know this data is easily collected for you already via the Data Center dashboards.
Step 2 – Locating grants available to you:
You can find local grants in your city, county or state. Some local organizations you can reach out to are faith based organizations, community service organizations like Rotary clubs, or local businesses who want to give back.
Here is a list of some great funding options if your recovery home is a nonprofit organization: Top Grants for Nonprofits
For federal dollars you can monitor websites like SAMHSA, Grants.Gov or U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. All of these federal agencies also funnel funding down to the state level.
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for example has a Community Development Block Grant program specifically for Recovery Housing Programs.
If you have an Organization like United Way in your state, keeping an eye on their website and introducing yourself to them can help keep you in the loop for their grant opportunities.
Researching and applying for grants can seem like a daunting task, but if you have the right tools in place you can make the application process as easy as entering in information you already have on hand. We’ve had many One Step community members say they’ve been able to leverage our platform to capture the data they need for grant applications. If you are a current One Step user, or are curious about how we can help with data for grants please reach out to us anytime!
Contact emmanuel@onestepsoftware.com for more information on this topic.