Speaker 1: The U.S. government gives out billions in grants each year, right? True. Government grants are free money, right? Not so fast. Government grants are for everybody, right? It depends. How you get access to U.S. government funding has changed. We're talking trillions of dollars now. This video shows you the new ways to find these grants, or other funds, that are the best match for your needs. Let's dive into the first question that I asked at the start of the video. The U.S. government gives out billions in grants each year, right? True. But it also gives out trillions in another way, directly to millions of you. Here we have to dig into a little bit of boring data for just a few seconds, but it tells the whole story. Here's the entire U.S. government budget at the time I post this video, according to usaspending.gov. Here it looks like almost all of it is in grants. But what are fixed charges? Friends, let me point out right now that the number one way that you, as an individual, get money from the government is not through grants, but these fixed charges, which is the new way to say benefits and entitlements. These are all the big ones you know, such as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP benefits, VA benefits, and so much more. Far and away, most of the U.S. government's budget, trillions of dollars, is in these fixed charges, these benefits, and entitlements. Later in this video, I'm going to show you the one big change that the government has made in how you find and register for these benefits and entitlements. So that's the trillions of dollars accounted for. Let's see how the U.S. government makes billions of dollars available in grants. Back to that boring data for just a few more seconds. Here are the major government departments and how much of the grants and fixed charges they have to spend. The smaller the box, the less money in their budgets, but even with the small business administration down here at the bottom, you can see it's still in the billions. And the National Science Foundation, a big government grant maker, also in the billions. Friends, I want you to have the full story about these funds so that you can be more confident when you apply for them, which I'll show you how to do in just a minute. But my next step is to answer the second question I asked. At the start of the video, I challenged a pretty big assumption that we have in our culture about government funding. Government grants are free money, right? Not so fast. First, ask yourself, just how does the U.S. government have all this money for grants and fixed charges? Money comes to the government from the taxes we pay and through government borrowing. Then look at all the steps involved in putting this government funding into place. This represents thousands of people and many thousands of hours of their time. Finally, you will pay the cost of your time to access grants or fixed charges. You have to provide lots of documents, complete several complicated forms, and then wait for weeks or months for registrations or applications to go through. Let's see what it takes to do just that by answering the third question I asked at the start of this video. Government grants are for everybody, right? It depends. Earlier in the video, we learned the difference between applying for benefits versus applying for grants. There are also two completely different government websites for you to use to apply for benefits or apply for grants. Let's start with applying for benefits, and here is the one big change that I mentioned earlier in the video. There is one website that I have always shared with you. I've walked through it many times. It is benefits.gov. The big change is that it is now gone. It has been replaced with the government benefits page at usa.gov. Let's go to the laptop and take a quick look. Okay, here we are at usa.gov benefits, and I'm glad I've spent some time looking at this because I think I'm about to save you a lot of time. You can scroll down this page, and you can see all kinds of things. All of this is going to give you website link after website link after website link, and if you want to read for hours, you are in for a treat. I'm going to say go right here to government benefits and financial help. Then want more to read, but I'm going to say go right here to all benefits, and this is what you used to get with benefits.gov, a questionnaire where you can enter in information about you, and you let the government's website system tell you which ones to call on, which ones to pursue. This, I think, is your quickest way to get the information you're looking for because, gosh, I spent a lot of time going through those other links. Lots of reading. Love to read, but is it going to help you immediately? Not really, so here we go. About you, and notice you're going to have this in three sections. Here's about you, more about you, and additional questions. In other words, the more you are answering in this online questionnaire, the more specific the recommendations they can make. Here's the basic one. Your birth date, marital status, citizenship status, do you work and pay social security taxes, do you have limited income and resources? This is a very different set of questions from benefits.gov. You answer these, then you select next, and it's going to be a good number of sites to go, of pages to go through to answer questions, so be prepared for that. You might have to have financial documents near you, and if not, you can always cancel out and come back, but that is benefits.gov. I say go to this benefits finder. Let them tell you which websites to go to instead of having to figure it out yourself. Applying for these benefits can be difficult to complete alone. I spent two years helping a member of my family apply for benefits, and we could not have done it without the help of a skilled navigator. If you would like to get help applying for government benefits, you can search a non-government website, findhelp.org, listing all kinds of local agencies and nonprofits in your community that are ready to help you at no charge. I did a complete walkthrough of findhelp.org in another video linked in the description below. One thing that the U.S. government has not changed is its free searchable database of federal grants at grants.gov. And who can apply? Here's a list of eligible organizations from government to education, housing, nonprofits, for-profits, small businesses, individuals, and some organizations outside the U.S. Let's go to the laptop to see how this works. Now here we are at grants.gov, the main page. What I want you to go to straight away is search grants. That's what we're looking at today. On the left side of the screen here, there are several ways to narrow down this search so that you can be, look at this, look at these results. There's a lot of reading there. Let's go back up to the top. Let's fill in some of these criteria. For example, opportunity status. Forecasted means coming out soon. Posted means active now. If you want to research closed and archived, maybe you can see the way something has been funded. That's good, but for a first run, I wouldn't do that. Let's see all funding instruments. Let's see, let's go to grant. That narrows it down to 1,745. Now let's go with all eligibilities. Let's see, governments, small governments can apply to the federal government as well. So for-profit organizations other than small business, and that means that the Small Business Administration has rules on what's considered small and what's bigger than small. So let's go to 30 individuals. Let's do non-profits that are not higher education. There are 913. Now here, then you could go down to category. You got care, agriculture, arts, business and commerce. Let's say employment, labor, and training. There are eight now, and if you needed to, you could go down here and even select the specific agency you want to apply to. Eight, I think, is good to review. So for a non-profit directly applying to the federal government, what can you apply for? Homeless Veterans Reintegration Program, AmeriCorps State and National Competitive Grants. AmeriCorps is a world unto itself. I will not cover that in this one. Comment below if you want me to cover it. It's extensive and complicated. The Good Jobs Challenge. That could be something interesting if you're in the workforce development space. AmeriCorps Senior Competition. Again, AmeriCorps, that's another topic. Private Sector Collaboration Annual Program Statement. Ah, but this is the U.S. This is international work with Egypt. So if you're not serving Egypt, this is not for you. The Resident Opportunity and Self-Sufficiency Service Coordinator Program. That might be interesting. Growth Opportunities and something that's going to help in Tokyo title, but this is forecasted. We don't even know yet. So let's go up to the one. Let's look at the Homeless Veterans Program. If you select this number, that is the opportunity number within the federal government. And then here you get some general information. They, this is a grants notice. There's some more information about here. The category of employment, labor, and training. They expect to spend $16 million total, not in one grant, total. Look here, award ceiling. You can ask for no more than $500,000, but award floor, you can ask for no less than $150,000. For them, they don't want to manage less than that. And then here's who is eligible. Here's more information on who is eligible. And sometimes that narrows it down just a little bit in case you have a question. Here's the agency name and then read on. And I would advise read through. For the U.S. government, this is brief. And then there is a contact. So that's a quick run through of grants.gov. You just select those parameters, read through, and see what's eligible for you. Before you apply for these grants, you have to register with the federal government. No matter what kind of organization you are with, your organization is called an entity and each entity has to get a unique entity identifier or UEI. You start that process at yet another website, sam.gov. SAM is a course of play on Uncle Sam, but it actually stands for System of Award Management. The UEI is a 12-character number. It is assigned, managed, and owned by the federal government. It is designed to validate your organization's legal name and location. Let's go to the laptop one more time for a quick overview of how this works at sam.gov. Here we are at the homepage for sam.gov. Two things I want to point out to you. I'm going to scroll down and this unique entity ID video, it's 10 minutes. I recommend it. It's very good. It's thorough. It's complicated and yet thorough. It's worth a watch a couple of times, but in order to get that UEI, let's go to get started and then we're not going to walk through the whole process here, but I just want to show you there are four sections of it and they're going to tell you about the registration and then they're going to you have to set up a sam.gov account and then you prepare your data and then the video. They refer the video again and then getting started. So you've read through it in those first three and then here's the getting started. Now one of the things I want to show you back here, this entity registration checklist, it is a very helpful way to go through because when they say what do you need? What is core data? What does that mean? And you scroll down, it's talking about name and address and organization start date and fiscal year. So lots of specifics about your entity, your organization, or your business, or your educational institution, or whatever kind of organization you're representing to get this UEI. So there's a lot there, but at least they have these steps to follow through to guide the process. Once your UEI and registration are complete in sam.gov, now you go back and register with grants.gov. This is a much simpler process involving contact information and setting up an account with a username and a password. What if you come to this point in the video and decide that your organization, or as Uncle Sam says, your entity, is not eligible to apply for federal grants? At least not yet. I have three options for you and I use all three of these all the time as part of a well-rounded approach to grants. Even though the organization I work for has a UEI and is registered with sam.gov and with grants.gov, you might be eligible for state government grants, but if those grant dollars come from federal agencies, you are likely to still need a unique entity identifier. So if that doesn't work, consider local government grants or private grants from foundations and corporations, or you can always partner with another organization that is applying for a federal grant. You will receive a smaller check, but you will also have a much smaller responsibility in the complicated reports that federal grants require. I have more details for you in this video to help you decide your next step in applying for grants, or maybe this one looks more helpful. I'm Tiffany. Thanks for watching. Choose your next GrantChatter video and I'll see you there.