Environmental Workforce Development and Job Training Grants

This notice announces the availability of funds and solicits proposals from eligible entities, including non-profit organizations, to deliver environmental workforce development and job training programs focused on hazardous and solid waste management, assessment, and cleanup-associated activities.

Deadline: March 18, 2011
Est. number of awards: 13
Funding available: $13 million

While Environmental Workforce Development and Job Training Grants focus on hazardous and solid waste remediation and health and safety, including required core training in HAZWOPER, applicants may design their own curriculums by choosing what types of supplemental environmental training they want to provide.

This supplemental training must include the following three additional training courses: 1) innovative and alternative treatment technologies (e.g., the training in the preparation of sites for renewable energy installation, phytoremediation, etc.); 2) leaking underground storage tank prevention; and 3) training related to solid waste management, assessment, and/or cleanup (e.g., construction and demolition debris recycling, landfill closure, electronics recycling, etc.). As EPA encourages applicants to develop their curriculums based on hiring needs in the community and employer surveys, applicants may choose to deliver the three additional required training courses at varying degrees of “awareness.”

Carnegie Corp. Awards

The Carnegie Corporation of New York has announced twenty-two grants totaling more than $22.2 million to organizations working in the United States and around the world.

Grants awarded through Carnegie's national program include $5 million to Turnaround for Children, a New York City nonprofit that partners with low-performing public schools to transform them into centers of learning and achievement; $2 million over eighteen months to America's Voice Education Fund, which works to build public momentum for reforms that will transform a dysfunctional immigration system into a regulatory system that works; and $1.5 million over two years to the Colorado-based Charter School Growth Fund, which invests philanthropic venture capital in the nation's highest performing charter school operators.

Grants awarded through the foundation's international program include $5 million over three years to the Institute for Advanced Study for its Regional Initiative in Science and Education (RISE), which supports the development of science professionals in sub-Saharan Africa; $1.2 million over three years to the Council for the Development of Social Science Research for research on African higher education governance, leadership, and policy; and $600,000 over twelve months to the Aspen Institute for its work with the congressional program on nuclear security.

The foundation also awarded, through its Special Opportunities Fund, a two-year, $400,000 grant to the Project on Government Oversight for general support; $200,000 over two years to D.C.-based Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics; and $100,000 over two years to the Aspen Institute in support of Aspen's philanthropy and social innovation program.

For a complete list of fourth-quarter grantees, visit the Carnegie Corporation Web site.

“Carnegie Corporation's Board Approves 22 Grants Totaling $22,216,000.” Carnegie Corporation of New York Press Release 12/16/10.

AmeriCorps Grants

The Corporation for National and Community Service is seeking applications from high-impact organizations across America that would like to use AmeriCorps members to address pressing social problems.

If the president's fiscal year 2011 budget request is fully funded, CNCS anticipates that approximately $311 million in total funding will be available for new, re-competing, and continuation grants in all AmeriCorps State and National grant categories, along with $1 million for AmeriCorps planning grants. The funds will be used to make focused investments in the six national issue priorities identified in the Serve America Act: improving education, energy conservation, the health of all Americans, and economic opportunity for economically vulnerable individuals; increasing service by and for veterans; and providing disaster services.

Public or private nonprofit organizations — including labor organizations, faith-based and other community organizations, institutions of higher education, government entities within states or territories (e.g., cities, counties), Indian tribes, partnerships and consortia, and intermediaries planning to subgrant funds awarded — are eligible to apply. CNCS encourages organizations that have never received funding from the corporation or AmeriCorps to apply for these grants.

Visit the Americorps Web site for complete program guidelines and application procedures.

Contact:
Link to Complete RFP

Charitable Deductions

[From PhilanTopic]

Proposals by three blue-ribbon panels to either limit or end the charitable deduction as a way to help reduce the nation's soaring debt have stirred a debate within the sector over tax policies that benefit nonprofit groups, the New York Times reports.

As the proposals have been made public, nonprofits have become increasingly concerned that reducing or eliminating the charitable deduction will cause irreparable damage to nonprofits and the sector. The proposed changes are being floated at a time when public-sector funding and private donations to nonprofits have been flat or declining, even as demand for many services provided by nonprofits is growing. Nevertheless, many experts, including Stanford University associate professor of political science Rob Reich, argue that it is unreasonable for nonprofits to expect a free pass as Congress labors to cut the deficit and reform the tax code so as to make it fairer and raise more revenue. "It's disappointing that the charitable sector, which is broadly committed to improving the well-being of civil society," Reich said, "is in this case indifferent to repairing what's wrong in the country at the expense of protecting its marginal tax advantage."

All three plans propose changes to the deduction in its current form. A plan put forward by the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform would give taxpayers a tax credit equal to 12 percent of their charitable donations — but only if they donated 2 percent or more of their adjusted gross income to charity. Another, proposed by Demos, the Economic Policy Institute, and the Century Foundation, calls for a 25 percent tax credit for all charitable gifts, regardless of the donor's income. And a third, proposed by a Bipartisan Policy Center panel, would give nonprofits a tax credit equal to 15 percent of any donation it receives, similar to the Gift Aid system currently in use in Great Britain.

When asked how a system that, in effect, subsidizes nonprofits would affect charities in this country, Joseph J. Minarik, director of research at the Center for Economic Development and a member of the BPC, recalled his experience as director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration as the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which lowered tax rates on high-income individuals while closing many loopholes in the tax code, was being negotiated. "One of the things we heard at that time was that reducing the top bracket rates would destroy the not-for-profit sector," Minarik told the Times. Instead, he noted, the legislation eventually reduced the value of a charitable gift to the donor by 24 percent, and giving increased by 10 percent the next year.

Strom, Stephanie. “Nonprofits Fear Losing Tax Benefit.” New York Times 12/02/10.

Nonprofit Employment

Fallout from the so-called Great Recession has been widespread and persistent. Three years after the economy started to slump, statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that more than 15 million Americans are out of work, 6.3 million have been unemployed at least six months, and the number who want to work full time but cannot due to economic reasons (U6) is stuck at about 27 million people, an eye-popping 17 percent of the workforce.

So it was a surprise when the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University released a report earlier this year which showed that employment in the nonprofit sector -- the fourth-largest employer, by industry, in the U.S. -- had held up reasonably well during the economic downturn.

Based on an analysis of data from twenty-states, the report found that between the second quarter of 2007 and the second quarter of 2009, the worst part of the recession, nonprofit employment grew by an average of 2.5 percent annually, while for-profit employment in those states declined by an average of 3.3 percent annually. Another surprise: annual nonprofit job growth over that two-year period actually was stronger than the 2.3 percent annual rate the sector experienced during the 2001-07 period, before the wheels on the economy started to come off, while annual job growth in the for-profit sector was a paltry .02 percent during that period.