Getting Grants

4 Fire Prevention and Safety grants priorities

With $34 million to hand out, the Fire Prevention and Safety Grants will be awarded to those who best meet these four priority areas

The Department of Homeland Security opened the 2014 Fire Prevention and Safety Grant (FP&S) Monday; it will stay open until 5 p.m. April 17. The FP&S grant has $34 million available for fire prevention activities and research and development projects.

Typical fire prevention activities are designed to reach high-risk target groups and mitigate frequencies of deaths and injuries caused by fire and fire-related hazards.

Accordingly, the four categories eligible for funding under this activity include:

General Education and Awareness
Code Enforcement and Awareness
Fire and Arson Investigation
National, State and Regional Programs and Studies

Each of these categories has specific priorities.

Tailor your application
The priority for general education and awareness is comprehensive home fire safety campaign with door-to-door smoke alarm installations and/or sprinkler awareness.

The fire and arson investigation category priority is projects that aim to aggressively investigate every fire.

The priority for code enforcement and awareness is projects that focus on first-time or reinstatement of code adoption and code enforcement.

For national, state and regional programs and studies, the priority is projects that focus on residential fire issues, firefighter safety projects or strategies that are designed to change firefighter behavior and decision-making.

Meeting the needs of people with disabilities, applicants in the general education and awareness category will receive additional consideration if, as part of their comprehensive smoke alarm installation and education program, they address the needs of people with disabilities in their community.

Early preparation
As with all other grant applications, planning is the key first step in preparing a competitive application. For FP&S your request should be based on a risk assessment of your coverage area.

This can be either a formal assessment that is conducted by an outside firm or it can be an informal assessment conducted in house by your officers and staff. DHS does not give a priority of one type of assessment over the other.

What they are interested in is how the assessment was conducted and what its recommendations were.

The second activity includes research and development activities aimed at improving firefighter safety. In the past, some departments have misinterpreted the word safety in the title to indicate that firefighter safety equipment, such as turnout gear and SCBA, were eligible expenditures under this program.

They are not. The safety portion of the program title denotes research and development of firefighter safety equipment and issues.

Keep these factors in mind as you are pulling your grant applications together. And, remember, you have less than a month to turn them in — don't delay.

About the author

Jerry Brant is a senior grant consultant and grant writer with FireGrantsHelp and EMSGrantsHelp. He has 46 years of experience as a volunteer firefighter in west-central Pennsylvania. He is a life member of the Hope Fire Company of Northern Cambria, where he served as chief for 15 years. He is an active member of the Patton Fire Company 1 and serves as safety officer. Brant graduated from Saint Francis University with a bachelor’s degree in political science. In 2003, he was awarded a James A Johnson Fellowship by the FannieMae Foundation for his accomplishments in community development, and in 2019, he was honored as with the Leroy C Focht Sr. Memorial Award from the Central District Volunteer Fireman's Association. He has successfully written more than $70 million in grant applications. Brant can be reached via email.