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Finding Public Funds 7 1. A grant is a financial award from a federal sponsor that expects modest involvement from its program officers. 2. A cooperative agreement is awarded by a federal sponsor when it expects substantial involvement from its program officers. 3. A contract is a financial award from a federal sponsor wherein specific services are performed for a set fee. Exhibit 1 highlights some of the differences among these three funding mechanisms. Recognizing that the federal government uses three different mechanisms (grants, cooperative agree- ments, and contracts) to award funds, we next discuss the tools available to identify funding opportunity announcements. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT INFORMATION SOURCES Grants.gov Grants.gov is your “one-stop shopping” source to find and apply for billions in federal government grants. Through the use of this common Web site, you can locate funding opportunities and submit applications online, thereby simplifying grants management and eliminating redundancies. All federal agencies are required to post competitive grant and cooperative agreement opportunities at Grants.gov. The federal agencies that award grants and cooperative agreements have developed common data elements, electronic OVERVIEW OF PUBLIC FUNDING Consistent with the 200-year-old Voltaire observa- tion, federal and state governments award billions of grant dollars each year. This chapter focuses on finding public grant funds at the national and state levels. In Chapter 2, you will learn the following: • Three different types of government funding. • Basic reference tools for finding federal government grants. • Basic reference tools for finding state government grants. • Tips for conducting grant information searches. Although no one single source of information cov- ers all government grants, many agencies have some type of grantmaking program, usually found on a Web site or in an agency publication. Because so much in- formation is available on the Web, we begin by look- ing first at the interagency references and then focus on agency-specific print and electronic sources of in- formation regarding federal and state government grants. TYPES OF FEDERAL GOVERNMENT FUNDING The federal government uses three different types of funding mechanisms to support or stimulate activities. Congress passed the Federal Grant and Cooperative Agreement Act of 1977 to distinguish between and establish criteria for using grants, cooperative agree- ments, and contracts. In practical terms: Chapter 2 Finding Public Funds The art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other. —Voltaire