FEMA Quest: FEMA Grant Management Best Practices

Описание: Make sure you get your FREE training materials from today's episode here: https://stormpetrel.ck.page/193ccc8949

What happens when you take a really boring topic and assign unicorns to it? Well...it’s less boring. And a little easier to understand. Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.

Welcome to Episode Two of our series on How To Manage Disaster Relief Funds. We will explore the FEMA public assistance grant program lifecycle and compare it to a fictious game we’re inventing called FEMA Quest. We humans enjoy the rich complexity of sports and games. We know that rules enhance the experience. Who hasn’t yelled at a referee at least once? But how to manage FEMA grants seems just out of reach. It isn’t. Let’s make it a game.

The United States Federal government utilizes the FEMA public assistance grant program to assist organizations and communities who provide services for the public good: municipalities, volunteer fire and EMS agencies, nursing homes, public hospitals, community centers, sewer and water districts. FEMA does not provide training on how to manage FEMA grants. The money is not free. The rules we must follow are complex. The reward is plain: our organizations keep the grant money. The punishment for failure is intense. Punishment may include prison, a felony record, and/or the loss of the grant funds.

Human beings love games, and game with rules. Open the Monopoly box and many of us have the rules visible during play. Get in an argument, we dive for the rules. In Scrabble, it isn’t just any dictionary at hand, but the official. You must phrase your response as a question in Double Jeopardy or lose the money. We will watch a football match and argue with referees who can’t hear us. We know those rules.

In a game, you win best by following the rules. Breaking the rules has consequences, fines, penalties, and may result in a loss. Let’s use the power of our amazing brains to view the FEMA public assistance grant program lifecycle as a new game called “FEMA Quest”.

Your mission, should you accept it, follow the trails on this terrain around and around. On each loop, you want to repay your team for money you have already spent. You’ll want to recognize the various critters and characters hidden here. And you will absolutely want to stay on the path and avoid jail and problems. There is no red-square called Jail here – for two reason. One, it’s be used by another game. Second, there is no way back. Can’t just roll doubles and walk away. Your battleship is sunk. The red card is serious stuff. You are not just a dead rook at the edge of the game board, but every gain you made disappears.

In this episode, I am going to introduce you to the Map in FEMA Quest and in doing so, I will relate it to the grant lifecycle. Our team is producing these materials because of COVID-19 offering guidance to those receiving FEMA emergency funds. These rules, this lifecycle, hold true for most U.S. federally funded grants. We touch on a few of the adventures and I’ll introduce some of the People of the Quest – Good Guys and Bad Buys.

Your ultimate objective is to recover funds from FEMA and your state within the legal bound. You are going to spend money and complete missions during this disaster. You’ll want to have FEMA funds help make your organization whole again – or as close as possible. We will show you the path and process by borrowing elements from a made-up game we named FEMA Quest, identifying the challenges, hazards, and rewards in a neat visual manner.

Heads up! Contrary to popular belief, the FEMA Grants Portal doesn’t actually help you manage your disaster relief grants. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about what does.

We're building a library of free training aids and information at https://grants.storm-petrel.com/ Come on over and Rebuild Better, Together.