The EPA’s “Pollution Prevention Grants: Environmental Justice in Communities” and grant writers
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The EPA’s FY 2023 – FY 2024 “Pollution Prevention Grants: Environmental Justice in Communities” should be of interest to states and institutions of higher education, because it’s a new, well-funded grant program (with $8 million available for up to 25 awards), and, most importantly, it’s offering nebulous funding that’s oriented towards processes rather than outcomes. The “outcome” of a successful “Pollution Prevention Grants: Environmental Justice in Communities” is likely to be more planning documents, rather than doing anything about said pollution or pollutants (really doing something about pollution requires changes in power production, transit, and other big-ticket items—things that we’ve mostly made illegal or arduous to change in the United States).*
The program purposes are suitably vague: the EPA wants applicants to provide “technical assistance” to local businesses. Having run local businesses before, I can imagine how many local businesses are going to be excited to accept technical assistance from the state or a local university. Nonetheless, it may be that accepting such aid is a condition of permission to operate at all. And the EPA says that applicants should propose “P2 case studies,” which ought to suck up most of grant time and effort. In other words, states that already have a department of Environmental Something Something can probably assign some of their existing staff to be paid by the EPA’s “Pollution Prevention Grants: Environmental Justice in Communities” program. Grant writers need to be cognizant enough to never propose this explicitly, of course. But we’re here not only to spit back the RFA, but to tell you, dear reader, what’s really going on. Want to know more about what’s really going on? Contact us today, at [email protected] or 800.540.8906.
The maximum grant amount for the “Pollution Prevention Grants: Environmental Justice in Communities” program is $1.2 million, although it’s obvious that not many applicants will get the maximum grant amount, given the 25 awards and $8 million. The number of eligible applicants is a bit small: states are eligible, as are colleges and universities. The EPA also particularly wants “minority serving institutions,” or MSIs, to apply. Local governments and typical nonprofits aren’t eligible, unless they’ve been designated by the state.
The EPA posted the request for applications (RFA) for the “Pollution Prevention Grants” program on March 8. Want to apply? You should let us help you: [email protected].
* There’s apparently a conspiracy theory asserting that the United States isn’t real, because many of the mega projects built prior to the NEPA era would be incredibly implausible to build out today. We do get some large projects done—Vogtle’s Plant 3 nuclear reactor finally opened in Georgia, to cite one example—but at enormous cost and absurd timeframes. If we’re going to do things about air pollutants, climate change, transportation death, and so on, we need to move faster and cut bureaucratic impediments.