Where to Start: Education Facilities Funding Opportunities

Days. Now our session today is led by Katie Gramajo, senior industry marketing manager for Brytely Software, a Siemens company. And with that, Katie, I'm gonna hand it over to you to get the conversation started. I'll come back towards the end so we can do a little q and a ourselves. Hello. Thanks, Wendy. It's nice to be here. I'm going to talk briefly about grant funding. While I spent my career in independent k through twelve schools. It does apply to all industries in particular nonprofit organizations. Independent schools are five zero one C3 nonprofits. If you weren't aware of that, it's something I learned and working for them. As you may know, if you've ever applied for a grant, they're very tedious. They take a lot of paperwork and where do we even start. So that's where I wanted to give you a brief little chat today, and we can go from there. In my jobs, in both of my jobs, I did a lot of grant writing in particular for school facilities, both sustainability, facility improvements, and security improvements. Most recently in New York City, we were being reimbursed for our security guard sound reason that I so you can imagine is a lot of red tape. So there we go. The impetus for this presentation came from the fact that earlier in January, this year, the US Department of Education introduced the newest, winners of the Sassy, which is the supporting America school infrastructure grant, and another round for renew America school grant. So these are excellent grant opportunities for schools. The first one was awarded to targeted states, which is designated to help them in upgrading their facilities. And most of the grants range between four point five and five million dollars per state. You can see the targeted states on my list there. As you can imagine in a whole school, district, in a whole state, four point five million isn't a ton. It's a good place to start. And then the the grant that I'm looking at a lot these days is the Renew America School program since that is taking new awardees this spring. You should definitely look into it right now if you're someone in a school. And I have the link at the end of this presentation, but you could just Google it. It's supposed to help the infrastructure needs and implement energy improvements for districts, especially high need districts, and it's for k through twelve public school facilities. And if you go to their website, they have some webinars. They have instructional videos they can help you get started. But other than googling what to do, where should you get started? Let's see. So what I would suggest first, if you're looking oh, it didn't there we go. If you're looking at grants, is that you really wanna think about what your priority is for your organization if it's school or not an organ or not school? What is your goals of your organization? What is the mission and how can you make sure that your project aligns with the mission and the objectives? If it doesn't, then it's not really worth the time. In terms of impact and sustainability, evaluate the potential impact of the project, and its sustainability over long term. Also innovation is often something that will win grant funding So you can emphasize innovative projects that contribute to whatever learning environment you're working for, or if you have a, you know, a nonprofit organization same general idea. And then finally community involvement, if there's potential for community engagement and collaboration, that always helps as well. I know I see a question about higher education. There definitely was a grant recently, and I'd be happy to look more into it and follow-up But, I know in the Bronx, there was a large community gardening, grant project that was approved and funded, and that actually goes back to this community involvement where all of the public schools are creating, community gardens that are being used in education. And so that was something that was funded recently. And I would definitely recommend, I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but energy is energy improvements are huge right now. So get to my next bullet point, as you can imagine with aging buildings and inefficient systems, it's decreasing your your building chance for learn. And as We just heard in our last presentation. If you're not doing your preventative maintenance, if your HVAC systems are failing, then you're stopping school. Many districts had missed school days this year due to heat. I live in Connecticut, and We had to postpone the first day of kindergarten by five days because it was so hot and under the air conditioning was working. And that was both difficult for me and my kindergartner. So as you can imagine, that's very important. And it's something that the facilities leaders of schools I believe can really justify the funding and improvements for, especially now, since it stops your learning environment. So then the next question is how do I get the data I need? Oops. It jumped too fast for a grant. How do I prove what I need? So when you go to a grant, and you say, I'm gonna apply for it. You're gonna need to prove what you wanna apply for. John, right before me, was talking about the CMS system, and that is a great place to start. And what a CMS system does is then you can take the data from your CMS system and put it in your next step, which is an asset investment planning software. And that will take your data to the next level to budget and predict your asset lifespan. So it really just takes everything that you have in your CMS, CMS, and allows you to predict future funding needs for your assets and your life span of your assets depending on your plan preventative maintenance as well as how it's been functioning. What's the downtime? How many repairs have you been doing? So I'm gonna circle back to what he said as well and appreciate John going before me because it really makes sense to lead into this. Data driven insights. Data is key. If you have something like an AIP and even just a CMS to start, You have data driven insights that you can use to decide what you're going to ask for. And then you have the data at your fingertips to say, This HVAC system has been failing this many times. It's been down this many hours. This needs to be replaced because it's affecting students. It's not just something that's breaking a lot. So that would give you something to apply for. Definitely make sure you understand the goals of the specific grant you're applying to so that you can state exactly how your project aligns with those goals. If it's energy efficiency. Obviously, it has to be an energy efficient project, but more more over, you can usually spin it so that it has a a more specific student centered goal. I think that tends to help with what you end up getting. I saw another question that said, why were those the only states targeted? I don't know for sure why those were targeted first. I believe it was the need and the application that was targeted because maybe they had more low income, but I'll look back and try to find out But that's who got the first few grants, this year in January. So you can look that up. It's the Sassy grant. The other thing I would say is you can explore other funding such as if you there's a lot of clean energy tax credits. We all know, you know, if you buy a Tesla, you get a tax credit, well, you don't anymore, but other electric cars you do. So there are similar qualifying projects for facilities, especially schools. And it just takes a little bit of research and being in groups like this, like, facilities net or APA is school specific or any of these groups where you can really share the information that you found with your colleagues such as a nice webinar like this and help each other. Like I said, the Renu America's school grant that just came out also has an energy class prize from the Department of Energy, which is offering four point five million dollars for sustainable schools. They announced twenty five winners, but they're still choosing more, which is for training and supporting energy managers at k through twelve schools. So that's more for the salary of that person, but it's another great help for facilities to have someone that would actually take care of those projects for you. And then as I said, the the idea is that if you have facilities data in a CMS and then eventually an asset investment planning software, it's that much easier to apply for a grant. You just pull the information you have. This is what's been failing the most. Here's all my data that proves it. Done. And it you don't have to do it all manually every time you apply for a grant. Which will save you some time. So where do we go from here? If you as I just said, if you have a solid foundation in data on your facilities that will really help you capitalize on funding opportunities quickly because often the deadlines are fast and you have to go to these webinars and follow their instructions and apply as quickly as possible. Having that place will help you and then also really knowing your organization's mission and goals because there are a lot of funding opportunities out there, but you don't wanna waste your time if they don't align with your goals. And then what actually worked for me is, as you can imagine, trying to find a real person is hard when everything's online. So what sometimes works is once you join a webinar, if you can find those people and find their emails, they'll usually respond to you and you can get a real person that will connect with. And also, this I don't know if this is good advice, but I'm gonna say it anyway. Sometimes I just send in the application because then they'll respond to you with everything that you did wrong or you were missing, and then you have a person that can help you and work through it specifically. Rather than just guessing from what's online because we all know that's really challenging. So I'm gonna pause for a second. See if anyone has any more questions, I think I answered the two that we had. Yeah. Those are great. Great questions, everybody. Thanks for pushing them through. So again, and you've got chat, but you also have the Q and a, tab open as well. I think we've seen a couple trickle in as well, Katie. I'm gonna just find where they were. Thanks. You know, and and I think you've covered this a little bit. And also, I love some of that, gorilla, you know, you didn't hear it from me advice right at the end there, but I think that's very helpful to How how else? What's the best way to get become more aware of these grant opportunities? Where are you looking for more information on what's available? So like I said before, being in these groups, like facilities that in APA have always been a really helpful place. There's also local managers groups. Hopefully, you're lucky enough to be in a local area that has one. I know I'm part of the Hudson Valley one now, and we have another Westchester one. Also, you could put Google alerts on for keywords, like department of energy grants, school grants, whatever nonprofit grants just to see what pops up in the news. And then, you can also connect with me on LinkedIn and I'll I'm sharing a lot of this information. So, hopefully, I can help you if I find him first. Yeah. That's great. I'm gonna keep the questions tab open for another minute or two. We've got some time. So we're talking a little bit about the actual identifying the grant. And then what is in the application? And is there, you know, how does that AIP software really help enhance some of this part of the process in the back end or the other side of that process. Yeah. I mean, if you're really looking for a facility specific grant, which I assume going in here is, you're gonna need, like I said, the data. If you do a facilities condition assessment, which most schools are required to do, and I'm sure other other businesses do something similar. Then you have that data, but it's stagnant. As soon as you get that giant binder that the engineer hands you, The data is already useless because things are changing. You're making repairs. Things are breaking. And so if you have a CMS system or an AIP system, which is like CMS plus essentially. Then you have real time data, real time maintenance tracking. So you can say as of February twenty second, we're working at seventy five percent efficiency right now in this system because such and such of downtime has happened and we've had this many repairs and it's cost us this much money, and it's all there. Instead of doing a spreadsheet that we all I'm if you don't have CMS, you have your spreadsheet on your computer and you manually input it and do it that way. So it makes it a lot easier. And the other thing it does is, Most of them, I'm I'm obviously partial to brightly, but most have, an energy management. Portion of it as well. Okay. Which can help you see your carbon data, your energy use, and track what's using the most energy and what you could possibly fix and use less of. Okay. Right. That's the big up. Yeah. Would Just about out of time, but I wanted to give you an opportunity in closing Katie. I just wonder if you've got, like, an example of a school that that brightly helped in this process or maybe some sort of, you know, short case study you could you could wrap in. So on website, we have a ton of case studies. If you go to, the resources page, and I'll to that or you can just shoot me a message after, and I'll send you the link. Sure. But, the one that sticks out to me most recently, that is such a big case study is Des Moines Public School District in Iowa, which is the largest district in Iowa. They started tracking their energy in two thousand nine. They were one of the early adopters with Bradley. I didn't even learn about Bradley till two thousand eleven. So they early adopt year. And, since then, they decreased their energy, used thirty one percent and saved twenty point two million dollars. Yes, I did write that down. I don't have those memorized But, having the data in front of you, you can prioritize your projects and figure out how to reduce your energy costs. And if you have mandates from your school district or your state or your government that's honoring you to reduce your carbon emissions or your energy use, which New York City is doing now, then you actually have the data to prove you did it. Versus just guessing. So it is very helpful. That's yeah. Those are significant numbers. Those are, I mean, for for a district that large, that is meaningful, meaningful savings. That's fantastic. Yeah. Great example. Thanks for that one. Sure. I wanna thank you for a great presentation as well. Loss of information. And again, everybody on the call, you'll receive a lot of this information after the fact. Always an opportunity to follow-up with Katie. Don't be surprised if you start seeing some invites on LinkedIn, Katie. I think that might happen today. Can you send me some messages? I'll help as much as I can. Thank you. Thanks again. And thank you again, brightly, for your support of our overall event today. It's great to have support for this summit and the facilities industry in general.