Client:
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Public and Indian Housing
Project Name:
Grant Management Center
Market:
Federal Government
Project Description:
The Office of Public and Indian Housing (PIH) Grants Management Center (GMC) processes almost 3,000 grant applications from Public Housing Authorities, municipalities, and non-profit community organizations in response to Notices of Funding Availability (NOFAs) for over $6 Billion in grant funds annually. Processing includes, support for NOFA development; receipt, review scoring and ranking of applications; documenting and reporting rationales; notifying applicants of success or failure; and providing reports to congress and other stakeholders.
North American Management supports the GMC in all aspects of grants processing as a valued teammate sharing its mission to process applications in a timely and error-free manner. (Please see Exhibit 10, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Grant Management Center's FY 2003 Neighborhood Networks Reviewer’s Guide, June 23, 2003.)
Specific support includes:
- Providing comments on draft NOFAs that improve the efficiency and accuracy of processing.
- Developing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that include checklists, forms, and quality controls for each contractor task associated with grant processing.
- Support GMC Grant Administrators (GAs) in the development of grant program operating procedures.
- Receiving and time stamp applications and manage the application inventory.
- Entering data associated with grant applicants and review results.
- Assisting HUD’s Grant Administrators with application screening and threshold evaluations.
- Providing subject matter experts to review applications.
- Providing logistics support for grant reviews including travel arrangements, acquisition of meeting rooms, meeting coordination and payment of invoices and gratuities.
- Generating and mailing notification letters to applicants.
- Generating reports on grant processing results for submission to Congress and other stakeholders.
North American Management has added value in many ways; including:
- We developed an automated grant review support tool enabling peer reviewers to score applications over the Internet. The tool prevents many mistakes commonly made by reviewers and eliminates the time consuming and error-prone manual data entry of review scores and comments. This system greatly reduces quality control requirements and error correction costs.
- We provided additional professional staff to perform initial screening, eligibility assessments, and threshold reviews in preparation for peer reviews.
- We provided professional staff capable of understanding the NOFAs to work with GAs supporting procedure development and internal review activities.
- We increased quality controls to catch errors and quality assurance activities to identify process improvements that prevent the introduction of errors.
Over the past six years, the Office of Public and Indian Housing (PIH) Grants Management Center (GMC) has averaged 2,2000 grant applications per year from Public Housing Authorities, municipalities, and non-profit community organizations in response to Notices of Funding Availability (NOFAs), while awarding approximately $4,000,000,000 in categorical and formula grant funds annually. Processing includes support for NOFA development; receipt, review, scoring, and ranking of applications; documenting and reporting rationales; notifying applicants of success or failure; and providing reports to Congress and other stakeholders.
North American Management supports the GMC in all aspects of grants processing as a valued teammate sharing its mission to process applications in a timely and error-free manner to include:
- support GMC Grant Administrators in the development of grant program operating procedures, receive applications
- provide professional, analytical staff capable of understanding the NOFAs to work with GAs supporting procedure development and internal review activities; modify the database in response to changing NOFA requirements and to support, improve efficiency and accuracy
- provide logistics support for grant reviews, developed automated grant review support tool
For more information:
Division Director, Housing & Community Revitalization or Information Technology Services