Each year, the federal government gives out over 150 billion dollars in Government funded grant programs to businesses and individuals. These grants are provided to assist businesses in growing and providing jobs, and to help individuals raise funds for education or other personal needs.
Despite the abundance of grant programs available, many businesses and individuals are finding it difficult to locate grants. The system can be very confusing. Luckily, there is progress being made. The federal government actually has a website, Grants.gov that you can visit and you can search by agency, category, or browse the available grant opportunities. Now, this is a step in the right direction, but as you will see, their site is still hard to use and the search function is well, somehow lacking. Also, this is not a complete list of all grant programs that are available.
You will likely need to employ additional research methods to uncover many government grant opportunities.
When researching for Government Grants, one of the best resources for research is the Internet. Try searching for the type of grant that you are hoping to apply for. Try putting the type of grant in quotes - ex. "grants for single mothers", and search with the quotes. This instructs most modern search engines to search for the exact phrase. This will often times narrow down the results to a more manageable size for research.
If this fails you, you may try visiting another government run website, cfda.gov - The Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance. You may try searching this for related government grant programs. There is a third government run website that may help as well, located at firstgov.gov.
If you still cant find information on the type of grant that you require, there are many commercial products available that maintain private databases of grant opportunities. Usually, this costs money, but the small fee might be worth it
if it saves you time and helps you find the grant that you are searching for.
Once you have found information on the grant that you hope to apply for, it would be a good idea to contact the funding organization and verify the details of the grant. Alot of times, information is out of date and you want to make sure that you have the most recent data before you attempt to apply for a grant. A phone call or letter to the group that funds that grant could save you a great deal of time and aggravation later on if you wind up with out dated information.
There are numerous government grant programs available. Locating them can be tricky, but is often times well worth the effort. With diligent research, you should be able to uncover some good opportunities for federal government grants.
