Deadline: 31-Jul-22
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Rural Utilities Service (RUS) has announced the Rural Decentralized Water System Grant Program.
The goal is not only to make funds available to those communities most in need of clean water and waste treatment solutions but also to ensure facilities used to deliver drinking water and wastewater services are safe and affordable. The Rural Decentralized Water Systems (DWS) Grant Program is vital to USDA’s efforts to help rural Americans who lack access to public water or wastewater treatment facilities.
The DWS Grant Program is intended to help eligible rural households that make less than 60 percent of the state nonmetro median household income offset the cost of household water wells and wastewater systems. With the DWS program, USDA makes grants to qualified private, nonprofit organizations which then establish lending programs – loans and subgrants – that support individual household water wells and wastewater systems.
Funding Information
- Estimated Total Program Funding: $5,000,000
- The exact amount of funding available for Fiscal Year 2022 is not known.
- FY 2022 appropriations provided for $5 million, but additional funding as a result of carryover or grant recoveries might also become available.
Work Plan
- Your work plan or scope of work must describe the tasks and activities that will be accomplished with available resources during the grant period.
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It must show the work you plan to do to achieve the intended outcomes, goals, and objectives set out for the DWS program. Describe any unusual or unique features of your project, such as innovations, reductions in cost or time, or extraordinary community involvement. Your plan must:
- Describe the work to be performed by each person.
- Provide a schedule or timetable of work to be done.
- Show evidence of previous experience with the techniques to be used, or illustrate their successful use by others.
- Outline the revolving loan program. Include specific loan and subgrant purposes, the application process, priorities, borrower eligibility criteria, limitations, fees, interest rates, terms, collateral requirements, and servicing policies. You can do this by providing a copy of your program operation policies, but you must include all of the information listed here.
- Outline the criteria for awarding subgrants, including specific subgrant purposes and the subgrant application process.
- Provide a marketing plan.
- Explain how you will transfer funds to individual borrowers.
- Describe ongoing or follow-up activities that will occur after project completion (such as monitoring and reporting borrowers’ accomplishments).
- Using your project objectives, describe how project results will be evaluated.
- List all personnel responsible for administering the DWS program. Include a statement of each person’s qualifications and experience.
- Address the process for complying with environmental requirements for multitier actions
Eligibility Criteria
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An organization is eligible to receive a DWS grant if it:
- has an active registration with current information in the System for Award Management (SAM) and has a Dun and Bradstreet (D&B) Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number;
- is a private, non-profit organization;
- is legally established and located within one of the following:
- a state within the United States;
- the District of Columbia;
- the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, or
- a United States territory;
- has the legal capacity and authority to carry out the grant purpose;
- has sufficient expertise and experience in lending activities;
- has sufficient expertise and experience in promoting the safe and productive use of individually-owned household water wells or decentralized wastewater systems;
- has no delinquent debt to the Federal government or no outstanding judgments to repay a Federal debt;
- demonstrates that it possesses the financial, technical, and managerial capability to comply with Federal and State laws and requirements, and is not a corporation that has been convicted of a felony (or had an officer or agent acting on behalf of the corporation convicted of a felony) within the past 24 months.
- Any Corporation that has any unpaid Federal tax liability that has been assessed, for which all judicial and administrative remedies have been exhausted or have lapsed, and that is not being paid in a timely manner pursuant to an agreement with the authority responsible for collecting the tax liability is not eligible.
- An individual is ineligible to receive a DWS grant.
- However, an individual may receive a loan or sub-grant from an organization receiving a grant award.
For more information, visit Grants.gov.
For more information, visit https://www.grants.gov/web/grants/view-opportunity.html?oppId=341295