What’s the source and where to find it! How do you even know if your organisation is eligible? If the funding is there, how do you find it?
This can be a significant challenge–but not an impossible one! Below, I’ll be focusing on Federal funding opportunities.
There are 207 federal departments and agencies—in other words, an overwhelming list of places to search for funding! So where do you start?
- Topics of interest
- Geographic areas of interest
- Populations/clients served
It also helps to look closely at eligibility requirements for funding opportunities.
Some opportunities target specific kinds of institutions (universities, community agencies, Indigenous organisations). Some opportunities require you to have been in existence for several years, and to have evaluations that demonstrate your impact. Others are issued to a select group of pre-qualified applicants each year. While this can help you narrow down available opportunities, it can still be overwhelming to begin a search like this.
If you google “federal government funding opportunities” you will be taken to a government of Canada website called “Grants and funding from the Government of Canada”. You’re immediately directed to choose from a list of topics on a menu to help narrow your search. These topics range from agriculture to student aid.
This can be one way to find open, or even recently closed calls for proposals. But this is only scratching the surface of the kinds of programs and opportunities available at the federal level. This doesn’t include arms length government agencies, or opportunities that are targeting specific regions. Nor does it include the many kinds of unannounced, informal funding opportunities that may exist (or that can be created).
In addition to the central website I mentioned above, most department’s websites have a section that lists grants and funding opportunities specific to their department.
Moreover, the federal government is committed to providing information on all grants and contributions valued at more than $25,000 through a policy called proactive disclosure. You can find this information here.
Using this database, you can search by organisation’s name, by funder etc. This is a huge database—last time I looked there were 692800 records!
You can search by funder, by year, going back to 2005, and by value of grant among other parameters. This is a helpful source of information about all kinds of government funding, from $25,000 to $5,000,000 grants, awarded through competitive and non-competitive processes.
At JN Clarke Consulting, we are happy to support you by conducting this search, analysing the results and presenting it to you in a readable and clear format.