CFPCGP FY2025 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Must be a public food program service provider, a tribal organization, or a private nonprofit entity, including gleaners in order to be eligible. Individuals and for-profit entities are not eligible to apply for this program. See Part III. A of the Request for Applications (RFA), page 15 for additional requirements.

The IRS designates many types of nonprofit organizations, the most common of which are those listed under the 501(c)(3) tax exempt category. The applicant does not have to be a 501(c)(3) organization. It can have another non-profit organizational designation. See Part III. A of the RFA page 15 for a discussion of what constitutes a private nonprofit entity.

You must be registered with the federal government through the System for Award Management (SAM) to acquire a 12 digit Unique Entity Identifier (UEI). This process includes identifying an E-Biz Point of Contact. This role is typically filled by a CFO, Executive Director, or other person who’s in charge of your organization’s financial dealings with the federal government. After getting your UEI, you can then register with grants.gov. All CFPCGP applications must be submitted on-line through grants.gov This process can take many weeks, so plan accordingly. Not having completed this process prior to submission does not extend applicants’ deadline for proposal submission. 

Once registered follow the application instructions on page 18 of the RFA. 

For technical issues with Grants.gov, contact Grants.gov Applicant Support at 1-800-518-4726 or support@grants.gov. NIFA staff cannot support applicants regarding Grants.gov accounts questions or issues.

The difference between these roles is explained here.

Standard Grants. 

Community Food Projects (CFP) was used previously as shorthand for the entire program, and is not encouraged because the full name is the Community Food Projects Competitive Grant Program (CFPCGP). Community Food Projects is one type of project funded within CFPCGP. See information in Table 3, page 11 of the RFA.

A planning project is intended to provide a modest amount of funds to groups that need some time to better develop a project or would like to do community-based food planning or an assessment. Planning projects can last between 12-36 months. A Community Food Project, provides more funding and time, from 12 to 48 months to implement a full-scale community-based food project. 

No

The program codes are listed in the Table 2 (page 10) and Table 3 (page 11) of the RFA. It is imperative that you utilize the correct code to indicate which project you are applying for.

• Planning Projects: Code: LN.B 
• Community Food Projects: Code: LN.C

For Fiscal Year 2025, $4.8 million is available to fund planning projects and community food projects.

For Community Food Projects you must ask for a minimum of $125,000 and maximum of $400,000. For Planning Projects, the minimum award is $25,000. The maximum award is $50,000. 

CFPCGP projects are intended to support communities through providing key funding to get a project off the ground, with the idea that this support will help them to become self-sustaining. You should not expect that CFPCGP will continue to fund your project on an on-going basis. Organizations that have previously received funding are eligible to apply for another award if it is for a new project; but applicants must carefully describe the ways in which the new project differs from the previously funded projects.

Roughly 20 projects are funded every year. 

Yes, you are required to match every federal dollar with a non-federal dollar, either in-kind or cash. See Part III.B in page 17 of the RFA.

Once awarded, new awardees are asked to establish an ASAP account with the US Treasury so that funds can be made available. Once enrolled, the majority of NIFA awards are available by draw-down rather than reimbursement. Reference of updated 2 CFR 200.305 states, “Advance payments to a recipient or subrecipient must be limited to the minimum amounts needed and be timed  with the actual, immediate cash requirements of the recipient or subrecipient in carrying out the purpose of the approved program or project.”

The applicant must perform a substantive portion of the project, and no more than 50% percent (federal and Matching funds) as determined by budget expenditures, may be sub awarded to another entity. Projects may divide their budgets between partners as it fits their work plan. A subaward is ​​an agreement for one organization to provide support for the performance of any portion of the substantive project or program for which another organization received an award. See page 23 of the RFA.

The deadline is November 7, 2024, at 5 PM ET. The time is the same regardless of the time zone in which you are located.

No. One minute late, such as 5:01 p.m. ET will not be reviewed as per page 1 in the RFA deadlines. Grants.gov attaches a date and time stamp to the application when its electronically sent to Grants.gov. The date and time stamp includes the submission time which is used to determine if an application is on time or late. We strongly recommend that you submit your application at least one day in advance to avoid any last-minute technical glitches.

Any grant application submitted or resubmitted after the deadline specified in the RFA for a competitive review is generally rejected unless the applicant provides documentation to establish an extenuating circumstance (e.g., natural disaster, confirmed Grants.gov outage, Grants.gov programming error) that prevented timely submission of the application. If technical problems arise with submission of an application, the problem must be documented, and a case number obtained from Grants.gov to support any problems with submissions. Read the process on page 43-44 of the NIFA Policy Guide on how to submit documentation for consideration.

Yes, if it is before the deadline. You must submit the application in its entirety. NIFA will review the last on-time application. Your previous submission will not be reviewed. 

NIFA recommends a start date of September 1, 2025.

NIFA Proposal review process takes 3-5 months. See this flow chart. You may find out the status of your proposal using the NIFA application dashboard. NIFA will promptly inform you about your proposal status after the peer review process is completed. 

Planning a successful community food project can take many months. Writing a competitive proposal starts well before the release of the RFA, with well-developed collaborations and a clear project plan. In general, plan for a well written proposal to take several weeks, allowing for time for collaborators’ letters and proposal review. 

1. Please review the RFA page 25 for a complete list. Page 21 of the RFA also is a helpful list. 

Fill one form per person, for the project director (PD) and other persons you identify in the budget as “senior personnel.”

The purpose of this form is to help NIFA identify persons who should not review your proposal because they would have a conflict of interest in doing so. NIFA provides criteria for who has a conflict of interest on their form, including co-authors, current or planned project collaborators, advisors/ advisees, and persons with whom you have had a financial arrangement, i.e. worked as a consultant. You can also list other persons whom you feel could not evaluate your work in a balanced manner. This list can be quite long.

You have up to 15 pages for the proposal narrative and may be written as 10 pages of text and 5 pages of figures and tables or tables and figures embedded in text as per page 19 of the RFA.

The proposal must be in 1.5 line spacing, in no smaller than 11 pt. font, and one-inch margins. Acceptable fonts are Times New Roman, Arial, or Calibri. See page 19 of the RFA.

No! All parts of your proposal, including letters, narratives, and appendices MUST be in PDF format. See page 18 of the RFA for a link to Adobe. Do not use Third-party PDF software because documents are likely not to open in NIFA systems. 

Logic models are a more visually oriented tool that illustrate the relationship between a program’s inputs, activities and outcomes. They can help you to clarify your thinking about what you are trying to achieve in your project, as well as present to reviewers in a concise format the project’s flow. They can also set the framework for your project’s evaluation. They are optional for the CFP application process; however, proposal reviewers find them useful as a tool to clarify a proposal. See page 21 of the RFA.

There are many forms of acceptable logic models. NIFA has not stipulated a specific format. However, they do provide this NIFA generic logic model template.

This program is authorized under 7 USC 2034 at $5 Million per year; $4.8 M for awards and $0.2 M for program administration. NIFA released the RFA for 2025 and 2026 prior to the passage of a full appropriations act for Fiscal Years (FY) 2025 and FY 2026. Enactment of additional continuing resolutions or a full appropriations act may affect the availability or level of funding for this program. The amount anticipated for CFPCGP in FY 2025 is approximately $4,800,000 and approximately $4,800,000 for FY 2026. See page 5 of the RFA.