AmeriCorps Seniors - American Rescue Plan Senior Demonstration Program
The American Rescue Plan Act provides additional federal resources to AmeriCorps Seniors in order to assist communities in COVID-19 recovery. Funding will be made available with a particular interest in programs that will serve communities hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Seniors American Rescue Plan Senior Demonstration Program (American Rescue SDP) will support projects that will be focused on supporting communities as they reopen after the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the American Rescue SDP funding opportunities, applicants must demonstrate how they will engage adults age 55 and over to address one or more of the American Rescue SDP priorities.
Applicants are required to address one or more of the following Focus Areas: Disaster Services, Economic Opportunity, Education, Environmental Stewardship, Healthy Futures, and Veteran and Military Families.
AmeriCorps Seniors will prioritize national service investments in the following areas:
• Efforts to help local communities recover from the COVID-19 Pandemic. AmeriCorps Seniors is specifically interested in applications that establish or support education, vaccination, and vaccination education efforts; particularly in hard-to-reach communities.
• Applications that actively engage in removing structural racial inequities, advance racial equality, and increase opportunity to achieve sustainable change in communities.
• Applicants may propose programming in any county, city, or town, as identified within the priority service areas identified on Appendix A (New Mexico is not listed).
AmeriCorps Seniors’ is prioritizing programming in the following areas:
• Access to Care - Healthy Futures: Applications related to increasing access to care and public health education opportunities in hard-to-reach communities and/or historically underserved communities; including, but not limited to, establishing, and supporting contact-tracing, vaccination sites and providing vaccine education, transportation, and registration. Applicants may also propose to develop programming to address mental health support.
• Education – Intergenerational Programming: Applications that engage older adults in supporting students and families for successful transitions in returning to the classrooms and/or strengthen social emotional learning of students to increase school readiness and K-12 success post pandemic.
• Veterans and Military Families: Veterans and Military Families, Caregivers, and Survivors – a program model that improves the quality of life of veterans and improves the well-being of military families, caregivers, and survivors.
• Aging in Place – Independent Living: Applications that support communities historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely impacted by persistent poverty and inequality to increase independent living for older adults and/or individuals with disabilities, to re-engage in their communities post COVID-19 recovery. Activities such as companionship to deal with bereavement of a loved one due to death related to COVID-19 or providing support to seniors adjusting to a loss of a loved one during the pandemic.
• Access to Care - Substance Abuse: Applications that focus AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers on assignments that increase access to care and participation in health education activities designed to prevent or reduce substance abuse.
• Addressing Food Insecurity – Health Futures: Applications that focus AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers on assignments that increases access to healthy food in underserved communities.
• Aging in Place – Elder Justice: Applications that focus AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers in assignments addressing elder justice, including activities that mitigate the potential that clients and caregivers will be victims of financial fraud, abuse, and/or neglect and/or that aid and support services to victims of elder abuse, neglect, and exploitation as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Economic Opportunity – Workforce Development: Applications that establish and/or support programs designed to increase the number of economically disadvantaged individuals receiving job training and other skill development services, with a goal of connecting individuals and families to resources developed to support post-pandemic life.
• Economic Opportunity – Financial Knowledge: Applications that result in seniors working on financial literacy, improving financial knowledge, and utilization of savings plans.
• Economic Opportunity/Economic Mobility: Educational opportunity and economic mobility for communities experiencing persistent unemployment or underemployment, and students experiencing homelessness or those in foster care.
• Economic Opportunity/Digital and Information Literacy: Educational opportunities that increase the number of underserved or economically disadvantaged individuals having access to and the opportunity to develop skills needed to use online resources.
Additionally, the American Rescue SDP will prove an opportunity for applicants to include up to six-month of a planning period in the proposal for funding. The planning time will support the development of community partnerships, creation of reporting tools, as well as the development and implementation of a recruitment plan.
Amount: Approximately $10,000,000 is available to make award that range from $100,000 to $500,000 and cover a two year period of performance.
Applicants are required to have a 10% match, regardless if the proposed program will recruit and place volunteers who receive a stipend or not.
Eligibility: Tribal communities; institutions of higher education; local governments; nonprofit organizations; and states governments.
Deadline: February 3, 2022.
Link: https://www.grants.gov/web/grants/view-opportunity.html?oppId=336384 ... See more
