Overview of Holy Cross Grant and Fellowship Policies and Funding Information 2002-03

Grants Office
Fenwick Hall, Room 450
(508) 793-2742

A brief summary follows of some key points in the GRANTS HANDBOOK: Resources, Policies and Procedures. Most grants for research, curriculum development, and instrumentation are institutional awards, i.e., the funds are sent to the College, which has responsibility for administration and audit, rather than directly to the faculty member. College policy requires faculty and staff members to clear institutional proposals and solicitations with the Grants Office before submitting them to government agencies, foundations or corporations. Grants Office staff will assist you in preparation of the proposal, cover sheet, and budget and will seek approval from appropriate College offices and committees (See Grant Proposal Approval Form and Cover Sheet Information enclosed here). Proposals which involve released time/leaves from teaching, or programmatic/staffing changes in the Holy Cross curriculum must be approved by your department chair and by the Dean of the College. The Dean must also approve any Holy Cross commitments for support staff, use of existing space/facilities, renovations of space for new equipment, etc. Generally we need at least two weeks before the agency deadline to read over proposals, review budgets and get approvals/signatures on required forms; any proposal budget which requires matching funds, cost-sharing or indirect cost waivers on the part of the College should be discussed in draft form well before agency deadline. Some information you will need to prepare proposals is included at the end of this overview.

Please remember that research/curriculum/student training projects which involve human subjects or animal research must be cleared by the appropriate College Committees: Human Subjects Committee (Pr. Mark Hallahan, Chair) and Institutional Animal Use and Care Committee (IACUC: Pr. Kornath Madhavan, Chair) even if they are not grant-funded.

Grants Office clearance is not usually necessary for applications for fellowships for which the individual faculty person rather than the College is the grantee (i.e., the funds are sent directly to the professor). However, if the fellowship involves a course reduction or released time for a semester/year, approval by your department chair and the Dean is still required as mentioned above, since faculty replacement or reassignment may be necessary to cover course offerings. Faculty members are welcome to contact the Grants Office for advice on funding possibilities for fellowships. We urge you to notify us if you are awarded an external fellowship; we continue to update an incomplete list of fellowships awarded to Holy Cross faculty over the last 20 years. We would very much appreciate receiving copies of successful fellowship proposals; we often get requests to see winning proposals from faculty who are preparing applications to the same agency.

The Office subscribes to many funding newsletters, directories, and electronic databases with information on government and private grant making agencies. We can assist you in looking through our reference files and grants library for information on external* funding of research or curriculum development projects. Several of the grants databases we subscribe to are The Grant Advisor on-line (TGA), grants CD’s from the Foundation Center (check out their useful website via the TGA Links page), as well as the SPIN WWW database (links to TGA and SPIN are on the Grants Office website). Keywords and search options vary with each database. Specialized deadline lists and searches can be prepared for you as time permits.

Faculty members looking for external funding in 2003/2004 and beyond should be thinking about preparing proposals soon; many deadlines for fellowships and grants tenable in 2003-2004 fall within the next few months and many agencies require six to twelve months for proposal review. The Grants Office has copies of the standard NEH, NSF and PHS (NIH, NIMH, etc.) guidelines and application forms, as well as those for some other federal and private programs. The TGA Links to Funding Sources provides quick access to many government and private grant making agencies; most of them (NSF is a good example) enable you to get guidelines and application forms rapidly via e-mail request or direct downloading in various formats.

*The College supports faculty research, publication, curriculum development, etc. through several internal award mechanisms; please contact the chairs of the appropriate Committees (Fellowships, Research and Publication; Hewlett-Mellon; etc.) or the Grants Office secretary, Joan Bennett (x2742) for information, deadlines, and application forms. 8/12/02

The Grant Advisor Plus (TGA) on-line deadline list/newsletter is available on and off campus to Holy Cross faculty and staff via the Grants Office subscription for an institutional connection to the Internet. New deadline memos/program descriptions come out at the beginning of each month 11 times per year (no July issue). The TGA Current Issue Files page on the Internet offers you a series of choices for researching grant and fellowship possibilities. You will be able to download your own copy of The Grant Advisor early each month in various formats (TXT and PDF). Additional features include current deadline memo hyperlinks divided into the TGA subject areas (Fine Arts, Sciences, etc.); 200+ links to homepages of government and private funding sources; "Excite" keyword searches of all grant program reviews and articles 1992 to present (many programs have similar deadlines each year); links to Federal Register texts; and a series of articles on grant writing called The Grant Works.

ACCESS INSTRUCTIONS for The Grant Advisor Plus:

There are 2 ways to connect, IP ACCESS and PASSWORD ACCESS:

1. On-Campus IP ACCESS (no password required)

To use this method, you must connect to the Internet from your campus computer system. The web page for IP ACCESS is at:

http://www.grantadvisor.com/tgaplus/index.htm

2. Off-Campus PASSWORD ACCESS

To use this method, you may connect from any Internet service provider. This is useful for faculty and staff who wish to access the site from home or when traveling. The password changes each month; I will send e-mail notification as soon as I learn the new password.

The web page for PASSWORD ACCESS is:

http://www.grantadvisor.com/tgapass/

When prompted for User Name and Password, enter the following:

User Name: tga (lower case)

Password: [ ] (lower case)--------[Enter monthly password]

SPIN (Sponsored Programs Information Network)

Using this database is a bit more complicated but the more complex search mechanisms allow more combinations of keywords, etc. On-campus access only from Holy Cross computers:

http://www.infoed.org/new_spin/spinmain.asp

SPIN is a computer database of Federal and Non-Federal funding opportunities designed to assist faculty and administrators in the identification of external support. It contains more than 2,500 sponsoring agencies, which together fund over 11,000 separate funding opportunities. SPIN not only tells of research funding opportunities, but also gives information about fellowships, postdoctoral opportunities, development and educational curriculum projects, sabbatical and publication support, etc. The profiles of sponsor funding interests are updated at least annually (updates are based on frequency of new information available from sponsoring agencies/organizations) and the information comes directly from the sponsors. A typical profile provides such information as the contact person, address, telephone number, fax number, and e-mail address; application deadline; award and applicant types; citizenship requirements; funding limit and duration; indirect cost, matching, and cost sharing requirements; funding source; and a full detailed text description of the funding objectives/priorities and restrictions (applicant eligibility, award amounts, allowable budget categories, and method of application), as well as an optional brief synopsis providing a quick overview of the award. In addition to the profiles of funding opportunities, SPIN includes Requests For Proposals published in the Commerce Business Daily, NIH Requests For Applications, and a Federal Register Weekly Reference Guide. SPIN enables users to search the database using selections from various categories (keywords, location, sponsor, deadline, etc.)

 

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