Funding

Previous Deadline: 06/01/2020. The purpose of the Children’s Healthy Learning Environments Grant Initiative is to provide capacity building to address children’s environmental health in school and childcare settings. The Children’s Healthy Learning Environments Grant Initiative provides funding directly to organizations to support school- and/or childcare center-based capacity building projects that help school communities understand and address local environmental and public health issues that affect children. Capacity building projects are projects that improve the organization’s long-term effectiveness and sustainability through management practices, implementation, and dedication to achieving results towards children’s environmental health. The physical environments in which children develop play a critical role in their health, development, and safety. Children, from the fetal stage through adolescence, are in a dynamic state of growth as their nervous, respiratory, reproductive and immune systems develop and mature. Because of these developing systems, children are more vulnerable to permanent and irreversible damage from environmental hazards than adults. Distinct environments like childcare and school-based settings have unique characteristics related not only to the degree and route of exposure but also to the timing of exposures. Reducing exposures to unhealthy school and childcare settings through the adoption of healthy indoor environment best practices can lead to improving children’s health, attendance, concentration, and performance.

Deadline varies based on individual grants. Section 106 of the Clean Water Act (CWA) authorizes EPA to provide financial assistance to states and eligible interstate agencies to establish and administer programs for the prevention, reduction, and elimination of water pollution. In 1987, Congress amended section 518(e) of the CWA to include provisions that allow EPA to treat an Indian tribe in a manner similar to a state (i.e., treatment in a manner similar to a state, or TAS) for the purpose of providing Section 106 funding.

Deadline: 2/5/2021. EPA provides Indian Environmental General Assistance Program (GAP) financial and technical assistance to tribal governments and intertribal consortia to assist tribes in planning, developing, and establishing the capacity to implement federal environmental programs administered by the EPA and to assist in implementation of tribal solid and hazardous waste programs in accordance with applicable provisions of law, including the Solid Waste Disposal Act (commonly known as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, or RCRA. EPA administers this program in accordance with the statute, applicable federal regulations, including 40 CFR part 35, subpart B, and national guidance, including the Indian Environmental General Assistance Program Guidance on the Award and Management of General Assistance Agreements for Tribes and Intertribal Consortia (2013; hereafter GAP Guidance).

Deadline Passes December 15, 2017. Deadline for 2018 unknown. This notice announces the availability of funds and solicits proposals from eligible entities, including nonprofit organizations, to deliver Environmental Workforce Development and Job Training programs that recruit, train, and place local, unemployed and under-employed residents with the skills needed to secure full-time employment in the environmental field. Please note that eligible entities who received an EWDJT grant in Fiscal Year 2017 (FY17) are not eligible to apply for funding in FY18. While Environmental Workforce Development and Job Training Grants require training in brownfield assessment and/or cleanup, these grants also require that Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response (HAZWOPER) training be provided to all individuals being trained. EPA encourages applicants to develop their curricula based on local labor market assessments and employers’ hiring needs, while also delivering comprehensive training that results in graduates securing multiple certifications.

Deadline passed as of July 15, 2016. Deadline for 2016 unkown. This notice announces the availability of funds and solicits proposals to enable tribal climate change and health impacts curriculum development and training, web communications, and outreach.

Deadline passed. Most recent deadline: December 6, 2021. Under the Environmental Education Grants Program, EPA seeks grant applications from eligible applicants to support environmental education projects that promote environmental awareness and stewardship and help provide people with the skills to take responsible actions to protect the environment. This grant program provides financial support for projects that design, demonstrate, and/or disseminate environmental education practices, methods, or techniques. The total estimated funding for this competitive opportunity in U.S. EPA Region 10 is up to $300,000. The Region expects to award three or four grants for no less than $50,000, and no more than $100,000 each. Region 10 covers the states of Alaska (AK), Idaho (ID), Oregon (OR), and Washington (WA). View the Region 10 request for applications (RFA) here. 

Applications Accecpted Year-Round. The Technical Assistance to Brownfields (TAB) Communities Program helps communities, states, tribes and others understand risks associated with contaminated or potentially contaminated properties, called brownfields, and learn how to assess, safely clean up and sustainably reuse them. EPA funds three organizations—Kansas State University (KSU), the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and the Center for Creative Land Recycling (CCLR)—to serve as independent sources of technical assistance. Each of these TABs has an extensive network of partners, contractors and other contacts that provides services across the country. They help communities tackle a variety of challenges related to identifying, assessing, cleaning up and redeveloping brownfields. The technical assistance comes at no cost to communities. This makes the TAB program a great resource for small, underserved, rural and other communities that might otherwise struggle to address their brownfields.

Most Recent Deadline: 7/09/2021. EPA anticipates awarding approximately $5 million in DERA funding under this announcement. A total of $4.5 million will be made available to tribal governments (or intertribal consortia) and Alaska Native villages, and $500,000 will be made available to insular area governments. EPA anticipates awarding five to ten cooperative agreements to tribal governments (or intertribal consortia) and Alaska Native villages and two to four cooperative agreements to insular area governments. This year's Request for Applications (RFA) has no mandatory cost share requirement and sets funding limits to $800,000 for tribal applicants and $250,000 for insular area applicants. Each applicant may submit up to two applications. Although funding for both tribes and insular areas is planned under this single RFA, the applications will be competed separately.  Tribal applications will be reviewed, ranked and selected by one review panel, and insular area applications will be reviewed, ranked and selected by a separate review panel. EPA's ten regional offices will manage awards. The number and size of cooperative agreements made under this announcement are subject to the availability of funds, the quality of applications received, and other considerations. 

Deadline Passed 08/01/2019. Deadline Unknown for 2020. This notice announces the availability of funds and solicits applications from federally-recognized tribes or intertribal consortia for the development and implementation of hazardous waste programs and for building capacity to address hazardous waste management in Indian country.  In accordance with the EPA Indian Policy of 1984, EPA recognizes tribal governments as the primary parties for managing programs for reservations.

To maximize the benefits to tribes from the limited funding to support the Hazardous Waste Management Grant Program for Tribes, EPA has reassessed the criteria used to evaluate Applications submitted for funding through this grant program beginning in FY 2015.  The goal of this effort is to provide technical assistance to a greater number of tribes for activities that involve hazardous waste management on tribal lands.

Under this solicitation, EPA intends to fund further development and ongoing maintenance of a web-based national information clearinghouse focused on smart growth. This clearinghouse will be designed to support communities by providing timely information that supports local decision-making that delivers better environmental and public health outcomes from growth and development

This RFA seeks to understand the health effects from climate change mediated by indoor environments. A specific interest is the evaluation of adaptation guidelines, such as energy-saving building modifications, from a health perspective. Additional optional goals are 1) the understanding of behavioral adaptations, e. g. time spent outdoors, or use of natural ventilation and 2) extension of building ventilation models to newer energy-efficient buildings and evaluation of existing models against independent data sets.

Deadline extended: 6/1/2021. The EJSG program awards grants that support community-driven projects designed to engage, educate, and empower communities to better understand local environmental and public health issues and develop strategies for addressing those issues, building consensus in the community, and setting community priorities.  The EJSG program will award approximately $2.8 million nationwide for this competitive opportunity. EPA anticipates awarding approximately 56 grants ( about 5 per EPA region) of up to $50,000 each.  These grants are for one-year projects. This opportunity places special emphasis on projects focusing on COVID-19 impacts, as well as climate and disaster resiliency.  Additionally, EPA is emphasizing projects addressing diesel pollution in underserved communities living near ports and railyards as part of EPA’s Ports Initiative.  Finally, to promote equitable accessibility to EPA grant funding and to assist small entities, approximately half of the total available funding under this announcement is intended to be reserved for small non-profit organizations as defined in the announcement.

Most recent deadline: 1/14/2021. EPA provides GAP financial and technical assistance to tribal governments and intertribal consortia to assist tribes in planning, developing, and establishing the capacity to implement federal environmental programs administered by the EPA and to assist in implementation of tribal solid and hazardous waste programs in accordance with applicable provisions of law, including the Solid Waste Disposal Act (commonly known as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, or RCRA). As described in the GAP Guiding Principles, this support promotes tribal government efforts to develop core environmental program capacities (administrative, financial management, information management, environmental baseline needs assessment, public education/communication, legal, and technical/analytical) and baseline capacities for media-specific programs (e.g., ambient air quality, water quality, managing waste, and other EPA-administered statutory programs).

Deadline passed. Most recent deadline: February 15, 2023. The EPA is seeking applications proposing projects that inform the public about new or existing residential or community recycling programs; provide information about the recycled materials that are accepted as part of a residential or community recycling program that provides for the separate collection of residential solid waste from recycled material; and increases collection rates and decreases contamination in residential and community recycling programs. Projects will improve consumer recycling education with the goal of achieving separate collection of recycled material across the nation, maximizing the efficient reuse of materials, and identifying strategies that otherwise result in an increase in volume of recyclable materials. The EPA also recognizes and encourages applications that demonstrate evidence-based messaging and strategies associated with effective communication campaigns designed to increase prevention, reuse, repair, remanufacture, recycling, anaerobic digestion, and composting in communities and/or decrease contamination in the recycling stream. This approach to community-informed messaging goes beyond education only by emphasizing researching the audience, building trust, and reducing audience barriers while emphasizing benefits for desired action.

In addition, the EPA is seeking applications for recycling education and outreach projects that address environmental justice concerns and focus predominantly on addressing the disproportionate and adverse human health, environmental, climate-related and other cumulative impacts, as well as the accompanying economic challenges of such impacts, resulting from industrial, governmental, commercial and/or other actions that have affected and/or currently affect people/communities of color, low income, tribal, and indigenous populations, and if applicable, other vulnerable populations, such as the elderly, children, and those with pre-existing medical conditions. Apply here.