Rural Child Poverty Nutrition Center

University of Kentucky lead by Dr. Ann Vail was selected through a competitive process as the grantee that would establish the USDA Rural Child Poverty Nutrition Center. The roles of this Center include: • developing and administering a series of sub-grants pertinent to the purposes of this grant • coordinating relevant grant-related activities among sub-grantees and researchers • conducting an evaluation of subgrantees' programs, and • widely disseminating information on communities' implementation strategies and evaluation findings. The goal of the Center is to reduce child food insecurity by improving Child Nutrition Assistance program coordination with other nutrition assistance programs or services in persistently poor rural counties.

The grant is to be used to establish grants and cooperative agreements to identify, develop and undertake projects to meet Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) program needs and the food, nutrition, and health needs of program eligible participants.

Cooperative agreements are awarded to State and local governments, hospitals, non-profit organizations and accredited colleges/universities. This is a requirement for the selected recipient of the grants and cooperative agreements, not the sub-grantees. Cooperative agreement recipients are to award sub-grants aimed at identifying, developing, and evaluating interventions and innovative approaches to strengthen the impact of Food and Nutrition Service programs on the food, nutrition, and health of program eligible participants.

This Request for Applications (RFA) was open to all Accredited Colleges/Universities, and Private or Public Research Institutions. These are requirements for the selected recipient of the Cooperative Agreement, not any potential sub-grantees. The University of Kentucky will be awarding sub-grants to government or non-profit organizations at the state or local (city or county) level located in 324 persistently poor counties in 15 States identified by USDA-FNS as having the highest number of persistently poor counties (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia). All sub-grantee projects must include a needs assessment in their community, along with strategies to address identified needs. Sub-grantees will also receive training on effectively implementing and managing projects from the RCPNC team, and will also be responsible for working with the RCPNC evaluation team to provide quarterly status updates and obtain and collect relevant evaluation data, including common measures across projects.

The total time period for which a grant or cooperative agreement is awarded may not exceed 60 months. See the following for information on how assistance is awarded/released: Funding will be made to successful recipients as specified in the terms of the grant or cooperative agreement with Food and Nutrition Service or as applicable under federal regulation requirements. The total funds will be released incrementally over the award years.

All applications had to be submitted electronically through www.grants.gov. Applicants were only allowed to submit paper-copy applications under extenuating circumstances, such as outages of the Grants.gov website that can be substantiated by a valid case number with the Grants.gov support center.

See RFA

FNS pre-screened all applications to ensure that they contain the required documents and information, including but not limited to: all supporting documentation, the narrative proposal, Letters of Commitment, and Agreement to Cooperate with FNS. Complete applications needed to be submitted by eligible applicants, meet all other eligibility requirements stated in this RFA, submitted on or before the required deadlines, and be in the required format. If an application did not include all appropriate information, FNS will consider the application to be non-responsive and will eliminate it from further evaluation. FNS assembled an evaluation panel to review and determine the technical merits of each application. The evaluation criteria discussed below was reviewed by a panel of evaluators and used to score proposals. The proposals were ranked by score starting with the highest score. The panel presented their recommendation to the selecting official based on this ranking. Awards were considered based on rank order, however, the selection official reserved the right to make an award out of rank order to meet agency priorities, program balance, geographical representation, or project diversity. FNS reserves the right to use this solicitation and competition to award additional grants in the next fiscal year should additional funds be made available through future appropriations.