Align Grant Coordination Workgroup

Workgroup

Workgroups are collaborative communities, often within an organization that complete efforts

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The Washington State Department of Ecology and the Washington Recreation and Conservation Office convened a workgroup to explore and design changes that improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our natural resources grant programs working on ecosystem management, improving ecological outcomes, and increasing public confidence in ecosystem work.

The founding charter sets the following goals:

• To enhance communication and collaboration among state agency water quality and salmon recovery grant program managers.
• To search for ways that agencies can help grant recipients save time, conserve resources, and improve project management.
• To simplify the grant processes. For example, refine the grant application process so it is seamless for the applicant.
• To align grant programs data, metrics, reporting, and timeliness when possible.
• To share grant guidelines, policies and best practices, where possible.

Grant Administration Streamlining was identified as an early target for Coordinated Investment resulting in formation of this coordination group by directors Kaleen Cottingham (RCO) and Maia Bellon (Ecology). The ongoing Continuous Improvement effort has identified a "funding system first" approach to improving overall ecosystem recovery, and has defined collaboration with the grant coordination workgroup, as its initial focus.

Workgroup Documents

• File:RCO & WDOE 2015 water and salmon charter.pdf defines the initial charter for grant coordination.
• http://fundfinder.wa.gov is a website being developed to support easy access and comparisson of a variety of grant sources
• File:Water and salmon A3.pptx - describes the groups purpose and focus
• File:Water and salmon 2016 april governors breifing.pptx - describes work to date

Grant System Improvement References

• File:Cereghino 2019 DRAFT project description problem focus group.pdf - output of a day-long workshop to define strategies for reducing redundancy in project applications over a project lifecycle.
• File:MC2 2018 lead entity lean study.pdf - a intensive examination of funding processes in the RCO state salmon system.
• File:Ryan-Penula et al 2017 LIO plan summary analysis.pdf - summarized "gaps and barriers" identified by LIOs
• Canty 2015 describes feedback to EPA about how to develop an effective program that achieves reach scale protection and restoration in the riparian zone.
• File:Cereghino 2015 grant administrative streamlining.docx describes an analysis of the steps necessary to develop a shared information architecture that could accelerate collaboration.
• File:Cereghino 2015 accelerating estuary restoration.pdf describes the barriers faced by 65 regional project managers working on large estuary restoration, including a critique of some dynamics in the grant system.
• File:Cereghino 2015 coordinated investment concept.pdf provides a series of images describing coordinated investment, including three slides with diagrams describing grant administration streamlining.
• Sahandy & Daily 2014 uses interviews to explore barriers to efficient local watershed coordination that could be solved by grant programs.
• Blackmore 2009 summarizes interviews that explore barriers to large project implementation in Puget Sound salmon recovery.
• Cereghino 2009 provides a 1 page argument for grant streamlining.