Video 2: How to Build your ANA Application

How to Build your ANA Application

ANA believes that involving community members in community development leads to lasting and positive change and is a key factor in designing and implementing a successful project. This training focuses on building your knowledge and skills to engage the community in community development and project planning processes.

Project planning involves a series of steps that determine how to achieve a community/organizational goal or set of related goals. The planning and development process should occur well before you write your application or submit it for funding. In fact, the planning process should be concluded well before it’s time to write the proposal.

This is video two of pre-application training videos developed by the ANA Regional T/TA Centers. My name is Drena McIntyre, and I'm your trainer today. I'm with the Alaska Region Training and Technical Assistance Center. We offer free training and technical assistance to the 227 tribes and native nonprofits located in the state of Alaska. For assistance, you can reach us at www.anaalaska.org, or call 800-948-3158. This is a 16-video series for training for pre-application to ANA. These videos introduce you to the basic concepts for preparing a 2021 ANA grant application to support your community-based projects. We strongly suggest that you go through each video in a sequence from one through 16. This is video two of pre-application training: the project design process and how to build your ANA application. Again, we strongly urge you to be very familiar with your funding opportunity announcement for the grant program that you are applying to. Make sure you've read and re-read the FOA and that you have a highlighter and sticky note handy to mark the important references that you want to go back to. The FOA is your official document that details the requirements for submission of an application to ANA. And FOAs provide detailed information for preparing applications in each program area. So, please read your entire FOA to ensure that you comply with and address all the requirements. To be eligible to apply, you must be a federally recognized Indian tribe, an incorporated non-federally recognized tribe, an incorporated state-recognized Indian tribe, a consortia of Indian tribes, a community-based nonprofit, an urban Indian center, or a tribal college and university, and colleges and universities located in Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa, or the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands that serve Native American Pacific Islanders. ANA projects are led by and for native communities. Your board of directors or council must be majority native, and your participants must be all or majority native. Ineligible projects include: those that provide a third party training and technical assistance, are conducting feasibility studies, business plans, marketing plans, or written materials that are not an essential part of applicant's long-range development plan. Also ineligible are any projects that are supporting only the applicant's ongoing administrative functions or social service delivery programs, or projects that do not further the three interrelated goals of economic development, social development, and cultural preservation. Also ineligible our projects from consortia that do not include documentation from each participating consortium member specifying their role and their support. And also ineligible is any project that is purchasing real estate or funding construction. ANA also does not fund organized fundraising, reimbursement of pre-award costs, construction, activities that qualify as major renovations and alterations, the purchase of real property, and activities in support of any foreseeable litigation against the US government. Your ideal grant-writing team consists of at least four people. You should have your visionary, the person who has a detailed idea of what the implementation of the project looks like from beginning to end, a community leader who is respected by the community and can convene stakeholders to discuss the project, a grant writer who has successfully written and been awarded grant applications, and a financial expert who can develop a sound budget for your project. ANA's philosophy is that these are community-led projects where tribes or organizations control the resources. A native community is self-sufficient when it can generate and control the resources necessary to meet its social and economic goals and the needs of its members. It also holds the leadership responsibility for achieving self-sufficiency, and it resides with the native governing bodies and community-level leadership. And planning and long-term goals should progress towards self-sufficiency, and it's based on efforts to plan and direct resources in a comprehensive manner consistent with long-range plans and goals. ANA conveys the importance of a community-led approach. The community provides direction on your community efforts. The community will most likely support a project if they had a hand in developing it. And if it's community-led, you will have community buy-in. Once your project starts, you maintain a conversation with your community and build upon community tools and assets and stay accountable for your outcomes and your impact of the project. The term community may refer to a tribe, an organization, such as a nonprofit, a geographical community, a community of practice. How do you define your community? And then to clarify, an application is the formal request to ANA for funding to complete a proposed project. A grant is once you're funded, you have an agreement between the grantee and the funding organization which finances project. And the project is a series of activities that will be completed in order to reach a specific outcome or outcomes. It is very important that you have already established a DUNS number, you have registered in the system for award management, or SAM, and your registration must be current. Once you have a current DUNS number and SAM number, you can establish a grants.gov account or submit a waiver. And you can also submit a waiver for electronic submission only if you have issues with bandwidth in a rural community. You can also then, after those things are established, create a workspace account in grants.gov to submit your application. More information about these registrations and accounts are on pages 143 to 153 of your program manual. Again, be very familiar with your funding opportunity announcement. It really is the document that you refer to most when you're developing your grant application. The funding opportunity announcement sections are divided up as follows. Section one is the funding opportunity descriptions. Section two is the award information about that grant program. Section three is the eligibility information. We went through all of these already. Section four is your application and submission information. And section five is your application review information about who and how your application will be evaluated once it's submitted. In your final steps, section six is award administration information, agency contacts in section seven, and other information in section eight. You should have a 2021 ANA pre-application manual. And what's inside that is a step-by-step instruction on how to address the evaluation criteria in your program FOA. Examples of how each component of the application should be developed, and activities that allow you to develop your application pieces in a way that addresses the evaluation criteria in the FOA. This is another great resource. So, please, if you don't have this, please download it from our website. The flow and how it goes. We'll introduce fundamental concepts for each section of the FOA, we'll address each evaluation criteria element for each section, and we'll demonstrate steps needed to develop application pieces to address the criteria. And we want you to learn from the examples and activities that we provide. Here's an outline of the FOA, the three main criteria, the 12 sub-criteria, and the 43 elements. And you can see under approach, you've got your project framework, outcome tracker and tracking strategies, a community-based strategy, readiness and implementation strategy, and your objective work plan. And that all totals up to 73 points. Under organizational capacity, you'll describe your organization's structure, staffing, partnership, contracts and consultants, and oversight of federal funds. And that's up to 12 points. And then for your budget and budget justification, up to 15 points. In the ANA project framework, this includes a long-term community goal, a current community condition, a project goal, TTIP objectives, outcomes and indicators, and outputs. The ANA project framework is an asset-based approach to community-led projects. It allows communities to self-determine what long-term success looks like, and it addresses barriers standing in the way of making progress towards success. It also defines objectives that lead to positive community outcomes. We start with your long-term community goal, move on to current community condition, project goal, TTIP objectives, indicators, outputs, and outcomes. And that is your ANA project framework. Your long-term community goal is the community's vision of success. Your current community condition describes the barrier standing in the way of achieving your long-term community goal. And your project goal describes how you will overcome, reduce, or eliminate the current community condition. Here's an example of an introduction of a project located in Colorado. The Pine Creek tribe has started a farmers' market co-op and is working toward generating revenue through sales of fresh fruit and produce. And due to their remote location, they have higher shipping costs. And they're trying to decrease those costs for their tribal members. What I'd like you to do now is to write a brief project introduction, you can go to your manual on page 23, and describe the following: your geographic location, your project sites. If you have more than one, describe all of them. Your demographic summary, and unique identifiers. Summarize the project that will form the basis of your application. We're with Alaska Region Training and Technical Assistance Center, and we are here to answer any of your questions. We offer 16 hours of free pre-application review for an application that is up to 75% complete, and provide tips and resources to help you complete your application. You can go to www.anaalaska.org, click on Technical Assistance and Request TA, and someone will respond to you quickly. You can also call us at 800-948-3158.

Up next

Video 3: Long-Term Community Goal

Long-Term Community Goal

Training episodes

Video 1: Brief Introduction to ANA and New Funding Opportunities

Video 2: How to Build your ANA Application

Video 3: Long-Term Community Goal

Video 4: Current Community Condition

Video 5: Project Goals

Video 6: TTIP Objectives

Video 7: Outcomes, Indicators, and Outputs

Video 8: Outcome Tracker & Outcome Tracking Strategy

Video 9: Objective Work Plan

Video 10: Budget

Video 11: Community-Based Strategy

Video 12: Readiness and Implementation Strategy

Video 13: Contingency Plans

Video 14: Sustainability Plans

Video 15: Organizational Capacity

Video 16: Submitting the Application to ANA

Video 2: How to Build your ANA Application

How to Build your ANA Application

Up next

Video 3: Long-Term Community Goal

Training episodes

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