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Learning Systems International

FY 2021RSVP Competition Training and Technical Assistance Series, Session 1

Monday, July 13, 2020

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>> This meeting is being recorded.

>> Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us today. I was going to 

complain about our pleasant 85°F weather in the nation's capital but it looks like 

Bart and Carol you have us beat with 104 105° respectively if anyone is 

experiencing something warmer, please let us know in the chat. Before we get 

started, let's go through some housekeeping notes. I just saw 111° in Vegas. 

Couple housekeeping notes, all lines are on mute and we will keep them on mute 

throughout the course of the call which means if you have questions at any time, 

please let us know in the Q&A pod. If you are experiencing any technical issues, 

drop us a note in the chatbox like you're doing now, and our lovely webinar 

facilitators will help you out, make sure when you use the chatbox to send it to all 

panelists and attendees. If you are having issues with audio, we recommend 

having the system call you. If you're having visual problems, leave and come 

back and that should fix it. Lastly, we are recording this call and if you do not 

wish to be recorded, you can disconnect at any time. Just note that the recording 

and the slides will be made available on the competition website which is 

nationalservice.gov/rsvpcompetition. Welcome again to everybody here and it's 

absolutely a privilege and an honor to be able to welcome you to this section 

which is the starting point of our fiscal year 21 grantmaking year for those of you 

who don't know me or my voice, my name is Anne Otih and I'm senior program 

officer for training and knowledge management for the SeniorCorps team. Again, 

it's a privilege to introduce you to our 2021 RSVP competition which just kicked 

off at the beginning of this month. It is a wonderful time because we get to 

introduce ourselves to potential new organizations across our country and give 

them the opportunity to join the National Service family and also we get to 

welcome and reaffirm and thanks so many of the wonderful organizations that 

have made the National Service community what it is. Organizations that have 

been carrying the banner of CNCS, Corporation for National and Community 
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Service, and SeniorCorps and RSVP for many years. If you don't know what 

those terms mean, don't worry, you're in the right place and we will talk about 

that today. First using the chatbox, making sure to send to all panelists and 

attendees if you haven't already, let us know the state you are joining from today. 

It is great to see all the different places people are calling in from. Earlier. I saw 

Williamsburg, Virginia which has a special place in my heart. I am a William and 

Mary alum. Thank you all so much. As we continue today session to send your 

chat comments to all panelists and attendees. If you have questions at any time, 

please use the Q&A pod. One more thing about questions, there are going to be 

a handful of questions that I will not be able to answer today. The first kind of 

question are those that I don't have information on hand or if it's too specific to 

your situation or your particular context. We have what looks like over 200 people 

on the call today. I want to make sure we get everyone the information that they 

need so if you have a question that falls into that category, you could send them 

to the email address on the screen, 2021 RSVP@cns.gov, and that's where you 

could get additional information and assistance. We also do have a frequently 

asked question document that is on the RSVP competition website. That is 

created and maintained with questions that we get at the 2021 RSVP mailbox. 

There's another category of questions that I will not be able to answer and that is 

because this is a competition. Competitive opportunity so what that means is that 

we need to make sure that we are treating everybody fairly so the kinds of 

questions I cannot answer and no one will be at the 2021 RSVP box as well are 

things like should I put this in my application? Or that, feedback on specific 

things that may give your application an advantage over others. We will not be 

able to answer. Instead, we're going to focus on providing the same information 

to everybody and that is what I will do here today. A few more preliminaries to get 

out of the way before we dive into the meat of things, this is the first in a series of 

webinars, it's a series of five sessions that will be repeated twice for a total of 10 

webinars. Kicking off today and continuing for the rest of the month, we will be 

posting the recordings in the same place where you went to register for this 
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webinar so you can't join one or you want to listen again, you could come back 

and get that information. First, we want to learn a little bit about you. I'm going to 

ask for our colleagues with the first poll, who has received a federal grant before 

including one from the CNCS? Fill out the poll that you see on the screen and 

we will get a sense of your familiarity with the federal government. Okay, looks 

like a little under half have a grant from the federal government. And some do 

not. Welcome! Our next question that we have -- how well do you know 

SeniorCorps? That is a grant program of the Corporation for National and 

Community Service that I work for and for which RSVP is a part. Let us know 

your answers to that. I will give you a couple seconds to answer this question. All 

right, looks like a good chunk of you are new to SeniorCorps, welcome! Our next 

question, how would you describe the primary field of your organization? So 

SeniorCorps and CNCS and the National Service community are very diverse. 

Our organizations have different focuses. You probably consider yourself to 

belong to more than one of these categories and that's okay. Just pick the one 

that best describes your organization. All right. Looks like it's a little bit of 

everything, which makes sense. Our final question for right now, how did you 

hear about us? This is good for us to know to get a sense of how we all came 

together here to learn alongside each other. All right. Looks like a little bit of 

everything. No matter who you are or where you come from, you are welcome 

here today. One thing I forgot to do when I was introducing you to a couple my 

colleagues on the line. I’m joined today by Courtney Sutton and Debra Truchon 

by the team and you may see them in the chat or enhancing -- or answering 

questions in the Q&A box. Let's take a look at our agenda. A lot of what we will 

do today is explain some of the terms you have heard me mention. What is the 

Corporation for National and Community Service, what is SeniorCorps and 

RSVP, the specific program for which the grant opportunity is now open? I know 

many of you this is familiar. Some of you said you were grantees but hopefully 

you will learn a little bit coming through this process as well. We will start by 

establishing some basic facts about the competition so that everybody is working 
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from the same basic information. We are accepting applications now for the 

RSVP program in specific geographic areas. If you don't know what that means, 

don't worry. Applications are due by 5 PM, Eastern time, on September 1. To 

view available geographic service areas, you will look at a document called 

Appendix A. Appendix A is one of the most important documents related to this 

competition and it lists out specific geographic service areas that are open. The 

way this program works is that certain geographic service areas are open for 

competition and they are tied to a specific amount of funding, maximum amount 

of funding you can request and a minimum number of unduplicated volunteers 

that goes with that. Volunteer being unduplicated means its unique individual. 

That individual could serve with one program in multiple different ways but you 

will only count that one person, once. If you look at Appendix A, and it's the 

appendix to the notice of an opportunity document, look at Appendix A of that 

document and it will list out all the current available geographic service areas. It 

will look like this. This is the first listing on the Appendix A, which you will see is 

an opportunity number, total funding amount number of unduplicated volunteers 

and you will see what is called the areas affected and that is computed as a 

package. When you apply, you apply for that package of things. Apply for specific 

geographic service area no more than specific amount of funding and to recruit 

and maintain no fewer than specified number of unduplicated volunteers. It's a 

package deal tying those three things together. We often get asked don't see a 

particular geographic service area that I'm interested in, there are over 900 

opportunities in almost all the 50 states on that list so there will be a lot but if you 

don't see your particular area that you're interested in, it may be because we go 

through a three year competition cycle and this is year number three so it's 

possible the geographic service area you're interested in has been competed 

previously and we will talk about ways you could get involved if that's the case. 

Let's talk about the resources that you will use. Many of your first questions are 

likely along the line of what you see on the screen right now, how long is the 

award? What is the review process? Are any matching funds required? What 
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kinds of projects is CNCS hoping to fund? Vast majority of answer to these 

questions are included in the document that I mentioned earlier, the Notice of 

Funding Opportunity. This is your gateway to the competition. It's your map to the 

competition and that means that all the information you will need will be available 

in this document or linked in the document, the NOFO. I just saw question in the 

chat,, quick reminder, make sure to add your questions to the Q&A pod but you 

do not need to be looking at the application during this webinar. To get to the 

NOFO, you need to go to nationalservice.gov website and you will find a link to 

the NOFO. This is where you should start, you should read it, you should know 

the document upside down and backwards and it's a critical document. You may 

have noticed the second webinar in our series which is on Wednesday is a 

guided tour of that document so please come back as we go through it and 

remember this is a critical document. In addition to the NOFO, there are a couple 

of the resources that will be important to you. These are the grant application 

instructions which are step-by-step guide to navigating our electronic grant 

management system, eGrants, Appendix A which I refer to and that's the list of 

available opportunities. We have Appendix B which you plan -- which explains 

the measures in-depth and that's another topic will be spent another webinar, 

July 21 I believe going in-depth on that specific document and the national 

performance measure requirements which are your requirements for measuring 

performance. We have the work plan development worksheets, which will be 

helpful to you in trying to think about how you plan your activities and how you 

can communicate your plans with us. And then finally we have the list of 

frequently asked questions that I mentioned that we do update throughout the

process based on what is coming into the 2021 rsvp@cncs.gov box. All these 

resources are available on the 2021 RSVP competition page. If after reviewing 

that information you are not finding an answer to your question, you can email 

2021 rsvp@cncs.gov. So that covers our competition overview and now for the 

fun stuff. Introduction to CNCS and SeniorCorps. If you are familiar with this, I 

hope you will think of it as a refresher. The Corporation for National and 
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Community Service is a federal agency responsible for civic engagement that 

leads service volunteering and grantmaking efforts in the US. We help millions of 

Americans improve their lives and lives of their fellow citizens through service. 

We do that by working hand-in-hand with local partners to tap the ingenuity and 

can-do spirit of the American people to tackle our pressing challenges despite 

the name, Corporation for national and Community Service, is a federal agency. 

We are a small independent agency and civic engagement and volunteerism is at 

the part when one is at the heart of what we do. We leads service volunteering 

and related grantmaking efforts in the US. Our mission is to improve lives, 

strengthen communities and foster civic engagement through service and 

volunteering. What is National Service? You could read along. On the slide with 

me, National Service is an opportunity to volunteer your time and talent to make 

a difference in people's lives and get things done for America. Through 

AmeriCorps and SeniorCorps, individuals of any age can serve the country and 

community by putting their valuable skills to use. CNCS oversees this through 

two major programs and a handful of smaller program so you may be familiar 

with AmeriCorps. AmeriCorps engages people in service often for a set period of 

time where they often pick up and leave and go somewhere else to serve that 

time. People of all ages can serve in different AmeriCorps programs but they 

tend to skew long -- skewed younger than our program. SeniorCorps is towards 

volunteers 55 and older. CNCS has a number of smaller programs. Martin Luther 

King Day of service, and the September 11 day of service and remembrance that 

you may have come across. They are all united under the banner of CNCS, 

Corporation for National and Community Service. If you want to learn more about 

CNCS, visit the website nationalservice.gov. Check out the stats on National 

Service in your state and regional office and social media. Today is about 

SeniorCorps, nation's largest network of older American volunteers with more 

than 200,000 volunteers in every state in the country plus DC and Puerto Rico 

and US Virgin Islands serving a 23,000 locations. When you add all that up, it's a 

diverse [indiscernible] and powerful community. Here are some of our favorite 
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stats. More than 200,000 volunteers all across the country serving 50 million 

hours each year. They do things like helping older Americans live independently, 

mentoring students with exceptional needs, combating elder abuse and opioid 

addiction and responding to COVID-19 pandemic relief efforts. Also has effects 

on volunteers themselves in the top right corner UC 84% of our volunteers report 

stable or improving health as a result of their SeniorCorps service. We have two 

other programs that are not RSVP but I would be remiss if I didn't mention them. 

The first is Foster grandparent program, FGP, this program engages older 

Americans as role models and mentors to help children with special and 

exceptional needs. Eligible volunteers in the program may receive small stipend 

to defray the cost of service. We also have senior companion program which is 

similar, except for volunteers in this program provide assistance and friendship to 

adults who have difficulty with daily living tasks such as shopping or paying bills, 

helping them remain independent in their homes. Eligible volunteers and when 

we say eligible in that framework, we talk about specific income threshold, they 

may receive a small stipend for the service so these two programs, FGP and 

SCP, they are a bit different than the RSVP program and couple different ways 

and have specific focuses, they have authority for volunteers who are eligible to 

receive small stipend at something that it shares with RSVP, all of our programs 

engage individuals 55 and older in service. That is the core of RSVP program 

established in 1971 and it engages people 55 and over again and wide variety of 

volunteer activities, essentially if you could think of a volunteer doing it, there's 

probably an RSVP volunteer or five that are doing it right now. It was built to 

meet community needs. It's built to be flexible. Among other things, RSVP 

volunteers tutor children, renovate homes, assist victims of natural disasters and 

I could go on and on. Before we get into how the program works, I will pause to 

see, Courtney, have any questions come in that you think should be repeated out 

loud for the good of the group about the CNCS or SeniorCorps outside of the 

RSVP program before we dive into RSVP?

>> No, I think you are ready to jump into RSVP.
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>> Thank you. We already mentioned that SeniorCorps is engaging individuals 

55 and older in-service in a lot of ways it's a program about connection, 

connecting those volunteers to community needs and leveraging them to meet 

the needs. If your organization were to be awarded the grant for this competition, 

your organization would be responsible for implementing RSVP project in the 

awarded service area. You would likely use the grant funds to support salary of 

RSVP director to run RSVP at your organization, which would now be the 

sponsor or grantee. In your application -- you will have explained needs in your 

community and how you would recruit in place RSVP volunteers in the 

community to make an impact on meeting those community needs. The 

organization where you would place RSVP volunteers to serve become known as 

volunteer stations and this could include your organization, the sponsor itself. If 

you want to learn more about what being a SeniorCorps volunteer means or how 

the program works in practice, we have an awesome resource on 

nationalservice.gov called SeniorCorps stories. I wanted to share a couple of 

them. The first one is RSVP coffeehouse. We have project sponsor names Valley 

Council for community action, community action agency in eastern Connecticut. 

They opened first veterans coffeehouse in Killingly, Connecticut in 2015. 

Coffeehouse offers a venue for veterans to socialize while providing information 

on benefits available to veterans and their families, speakers represent variety of 

organizations serving veterans such as soldiers sailors and Marines funds, 

veteran service office of Connecticut Department of Veterans Affairs and through 

the connections made it coffeehouse, veterans have access to additional 

services and benefits for which they were eligible including housing, energy, 

medical and food assistance post-op original coffeehouse is now self-sustaining 

and operates independently of RSVP with the support of 14 RSVP volunteers. 

Sponsoring organization was able to open for additional coffee houses and 

between April 2016 and January 2018, total of 535 veterans have attended the 

RSVP veterans coffee houses throughout Eastern Connecticut. We have another 

volunteer, when asked about his time volunteering in community, SeniorCorps 
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volunteer some did it best there's no better place to meet people caring, happy 

people who lift me up. Jim is a retired professor and biological and agricultural 

engineering at Kansas State University. During his time as RSVP volunteer, he 

has organize and manage parking lot in line of cars for the harvesters mobile 

food pantry each month. He spent time working with the VITA tax program and 

state and national organizations related to his work in agriculture and 

engineering. These are a handful of examples. As you can see from previous 

screenshot, there are many stories. I recommend taking time to explore these 

resources because it's the best way to get to know RSVP. We will add these links 

in the chat but to learn more, you have the stories that we just shared and linked 

to those will be in the chatbox we have impact videos these are great because 

you get to see programs and volunteers telling their story in their own words. You 

get to see them in action. I mentioned the National Service in your state earlier 

but for the question of other ways to get involved if you don't see your specific 

geographic service area on Appendix A, it's a great starting place. Finally, we 

post results of the competition online at the website that you will see in the chat, 

transparency postings or transparency results. You could go and be successful 

and unsuccessful applications from the past on that site. It's another great 

resource to get to know RSVP. Now that we've got a picture in our mind, let's get 

more technical. We will now spend time working with specific terms. To the 

question I see if I don't see my [indiscernible] on the appendix, what to do? 

Check out National Service in your state to see what programs are close by. 

There are two key terms that you need to know to understand how RSVP works. 

The first is sponsor, which we use synonymous to a grantee. That is an 

organization that receives RSVP funding and is legally responsible for the grant 

funds. If you submit application to this competition, you will need someone to 

sign that says I officially accept responsibility for everything I am seeing in the 

organization that has that authority and that is the sponsor, they are legally 

responsible. There's another set of organization called the station and that's 

community partner where RSVP partner serves -- volunteer service. Volunteer 
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stations is where RSVP volunteers serve and they could be nonprofit 

organization, proprietary healthcare facilities or public agencies. Some 

organizations may choose to operate like volunteer matchmaker recruiting 

diverse group of volunteers and placing them at a wide variety of stations. Others 

may choose to focus on couple of specific stations for example, organization that 

provides educational programs may choose to focus its efforts and volunteers on 

education within specific schools that serve as stations. Sponsor organization 

can serve as RSVP volunteers so you could have volunteers serving your own 

program. If the organization applies for funds. Relationship between sponsors 

and stations is formalized in memoranda of understanding. RSVP's volunteers 

sponsors work with volunteer stations undersigned MOU in your RSVP project 

would assign RSVP volunteers to that particular volunteer station. What that 

means is you have the grantee or the sponsor that is receiving the funds, you 

have stations in the community, grantee provides management of the grant in the 

volunteers and station provide on-site supervision and management of the 

volunteers. Also performance data will be given back to the grantee so they could 

enter it back to us at CNCS and all of that is formalized in the memorandum of 

understanding. To help us think through how this looks in practice, we will share 

couple models of what RSVP could look like. This is example of what RSVP 

program that focuses on multiple issues with multiple partners. As you can see, 

SeniorCorps makes the grant to the sponsor which then recruits volunteers and 

places them at external stations other organizations. They could also be 

conducting a wide variety of activities so one could be a food bank and another 

could be a school. Here is another example of another type of model. 

SeniorCorps would make the grant to the sponsor and the sponsor runs its own 

programs. They may be focused working only in area of education. The sponsor 

could then recruit volunteers to work on its own programs. At CNCS and 

SeniorCorps we provide funds to the sponsoring organization, the grantee 

becomes legally responsible for managing the grant. They recruit volunteers in 

their community and they placed them at community stations. Now that you know 
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more about RSVP, you probably are starting to realize the benefits that RSVP 

could bring to your organization if you are awarded the grant through this 

competition. RSVP volunteers can be used to build capacity at your organization 

through their service. Organization would become part of the larger SeniorCorps 

and National Service network. RSVP project would strengthen other 

organizations in your community and throughout the service area and finally your 

award would demonstrate that your application was strong enough to be 

awarded through competitive process. Alongside with the benefits to this 

sponsor, the benefits to the volunteer aren't hard to find. They get to make 

tangible impact on their community's -- community, enjoy flexible schedule and 

make friends and flexible opportunities and there's a growing body of research 

that indicates being involved in something like RSVP can increase seniors health 

and happiness as they age. You can reimburse them for some costs of their 

service also. So we've got another poll that I will ask webinar facilitators to post. 

The first which of these reasons are you applying or are interested in applying for 

RSVP grant, which is more important to you? Furthering your organization's 

mission, helping older Americans in community staying active and engaged, 

leveraging the power of volunteers to meet -- to meet critical community needs, 

building capacity, and the rest. I will give you some time to choose one. All right, 

looks like it's a little bit of everything. That makes sense because it's all about 

what is right in your community. The next question -- if I receive RSVP grant, I 

am likely to blank, please select an answer. Couple more seconds to let 

everyone choose an option. All right, thank you for participating in our poll. Let's 

move on to the next subject. All RSVP grants will measure the performance and 

reported back to us and we have a system that we use to do it. This is probably 

one of the most complicated parts of applying or applying for RSVP grant and 

that's why we will talk about it today. But I will also note that we have a whole 

webinar on the performance measures planned for later in the cycle. Volunteers 

can be allocated to two kinds of work plans. National performance measure work 

plans which we also call outcome-based work plans because they result in 
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specific outputs and outcomes. Specific measurable things. That is one option 

and then we have the other community priority workplan and that's more of a 

catch all for other activities that don't fit into the specific measures. There is a 

requirement that applicants must place -- must place at least one volunteer in 

work plans for every $1000 in federal funding that they receive. What does that 

mean? How does this connect to the other amount of unduplicated volunteers 

that you have seen on Appendix A? We will spend some time on this. We have 

an example Appendix A, you see information that looks like this, the state, 

opportunity number, total annual funding available, number of unduplicated

volunteers and then this area affected, geographic service area. So you could 

apply no more than this amount of funding. This example -- someone who is in 

Verona could apply for no more than $75,000 and if you apply for this particular 

service area, you need to have at least 100 unduplicated volunteers. Then you 

look at our requirements. We have a requirement that you must program at least 

one unduplicated volunteer in national performance measure work plans for 

every $1000 in federal funding that you receive. So we need to do a little bit of 

math to reconcile this. First you divide the total annual funding amount by 1000 

so 75,000÷1000 and that gives us 75. That means if you were an organization 

that was in this service area, if you apply for this particular service area, you 

would need to program at least 75 unduplicated volunteers in the national 

performance measure work plans and work plans that resulted in an outcome. 

You need to program your other volunteers in this case at least 25 with no less 

than 100 total volunteers so this could be 75 or 77 or any number all the way up 

to 100, but that first number, total annual funding divided by $1000, that amount 

of unduplicated volunteers needs to be placed in an outcome based workplan 

and then the remaining number of volunteers could be placed in another 

community priority workplan or additional outcome based work plans. It is 

minimum amount that you need to program in a specific way. That is described in 

depth in these documents, Appendix B, national performance measure 

instructions and the workplan development worksheets. CNCS performance 
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measures fall into six focus areas, disaster services, economic opportunity, 

education, environmental stewardship, healthy futures, veterans and military 

families and then capacity building. Here's a screenshot from our performance 

measure instructions and you will see each output has a corresponding outcome 

or outcomes to choose from for a certain objective. Here's another screenshot 

from the performance measure instructions that shows definitions of these 

measures. On the screen now you will see the components of performance 

measure work plans. We are going to barely scratch the surface of this today and 

we will be talking about them in-depth for an hour later on in this cycle of 

webinars. That is when we dive into the question about perform -- about 

performance measures. Just know for now that this is how we at CNCS measure 

performance. They are important and focus on requirements that you see in 

these key documents that I shared, Appendix B and the workplan development 

worksheets. So we have a couple of poll questions. Read along on the screen --

Townsville Council on Aging plans to apply for an area affected that includes 

North, South, East and West counties and Appendix A is listed $85,000 of 

funding available and minimum number of unduplicated volunteers of 115. How 

many unduplicated volunteers must it include in national performance measure 

work plans? I will give you a couple seconds to answer that. Remember there is 

a cost per unduplicated threshold. That is my hint. [laughing].

All right. The correct answer is 85 because we will take $85,000 and divide by 

$1000. And we get minimum number of unduplicated volunteers that need to be 

placed in a national performance measure workplan and outcome based 

workplan is 85. But assuming it only includes a minimum number of volunteers 

required in the national performance measure work plans which is 85, how many 

unduplicated volunteers must include in other community priorities? Looks like 

everyone is selecting the correct one. The answer is 30. 30 remaining volunteers 

don't need to be placed in other community priorities if there is outcome-based 

workplan that you have community need for. You could program volunteers 

there, but that is also an option for you. The last question we have, true or false, 
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it must include all of its national performance measure volunteers in one single 

workplan. I will give you a couple more seconds for this one. The correct answer 

is false. You could have as many work plans as you need to meet your 

community needs. Great! Couple more things to highlight before we take 

questions. The first one is important piece of how RSVP works. Because we are 

federal program paid for with taxpayer dollars, we have to follow certain rules 

when we run these programs. They are collected in what is called the Code of 

Federal Regulations. Specifically the code of trachulae -- the Code of Federal 

Regulations 45, part 2553 is a source of requirements for the RSVP program. If 

you're considering applying for RSVP grants, please read the CFR for RSVP. If 

you want to look at it, you could go to ecfr.gov and then 45, part 2553. There's 

another important part of Code of Federal Regulations called the CFR 200 is 

called uniform guidance and that governs how you could use financial side of 

your grant so if you have another federal grant, somebody said you had another 

federal grant in our first poll, probably familiar with CFR 200 and if some of the 

same rules that are used to govern will be applied to the RSVP grant as well. 

One spotlight, the regulations right now, first there are service activities that you 

cannot engage in so RSVP volunteers cannot replace paid staff, cannot have 

volunteer activities that are political in nature including influencing elections for 

voter registration activities. RSVP volunteers cannot give religious instruction or 

conduct worship services. As part of their duties. The sponsor cannot use grant 

funds directly or indirectly to finance labor or anti-labor organizations or related 

activity. We also have specific requirements on the kinds of criminal history 

checks that your staff goes through. Highlighting importance of reading to the 

notice of funding opportunity so I will say it again, Notice of Funding Opportunity 

is a very, very important document to make sure that you read it through. These 

are some common types of costs that we see in the grant application. These are 

just common things and not meant to be an exclusive list. Another thing I wanted 

to mention is match and I saw a question about match. It is a requirement of our 

grants, the way match requirements work in your first year of getting the award, 
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you are required to match 10% of the total project budget and then for each of 

the first three years that increases by 10% until it gets to 30%. If you are an 

incumbent so that means that you already are in RSVP grantee applying for the 

same service area that you currently serve, then you will be starting at this 30% 

level because you are already there. New applicants, you look at the sliding scale 

but incumbent you enter at 30% total project if given the award. The project 

period for grants for this competition is three years. CNCS generally funds one 

year of the three year award at first. Grantees are eligible for continuation funding 

for years number two and three as long as they demonstrate satisfactory 

performance that indicates the grant is on track to achieve post-performance 

measures at the end of the three year period that they demonstrate the capacity 

to manage the grant in compliance with grant requirements and that includes 

terms and conditions of the grant, requirement for biannual reporting of 

performance measures and securing required match of the budget. And then 

availability of congressional appropriations. After three years, the grant may be 

renewed which is a noncompetitive process pending appropriation on satisfactory 

performance. If you are renewed after the three years, competition begins again, 

three years later so six years from the initial award and I know that sounds 

confusing so here's a graphic that shows it. If given the initial award, you start in 

2021, pending appropriations and satisfactory performance, you could be 

awarded continuation for the second and third year and then you are able to 

renew your grant and after six years, you go through competition again. That 

concludes our prepared content for the afternoon. While we get ready to 

transition into questions, I wanted to share this calendar of our series and hope 

that you will join us as we delve specifically into the NOFO, performance 

measures and more. With that, I will invite Courtney on the line to share any 

questions that should be repeated out loud for the greater good.

>> Thank you. We have a lot of questions about Appendix A. Do you mind 

repeating what you said about Appendix A and the surface area available on 

Appendix A?
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>> Sure, we have a three year cycle and this is year number three so if you don't 

see your geographic service area on Appendix A now, it's likely that your area 

was competed in the past two years but that doesn't mean you can't get involved 

with SeniorCorps. I would recommend going to the link that we shared earlier 

about National Service in your state and that will show the organizations who 

have the grant in your service area, and you could contact them to perhaps 

become a station and have volunteers serve at your organization and thank you, 

Jeff, just added that to the chatbox.

>> Next question is if you can explain more about the maximum dollar amount 

and the minimum number of unduplicated volunteers.

>> Sure, on Appendix A, you will see a package of three things that we 

compete. Geographic service area, number of unduplicated volunteers and total 

amount of funding. When you are applying to an opportunity, you are applying for 

that total amount of funding and that number of unduplicated volunteers. You 

could always have more than what is written in terms of the volunteers. Let's say 

there are 100 unduplicated volunteers in that area and you may program more 

but you cannot program less.

>> As follow-up question to that is does it mean that the grantee or the applicant 

would have to recruit manage and allocate all the volunteers listed in Appendix A 

for the geographic service area?

>> Yes.

>> One more follow-up -- or are applicants allowed to apply for a small amount 

of the full number that is on Appendix A?

>> You have to apply for the full amount on Appendix A.

>> We also have questions about COVID-19. The stations for COVID-19 and 

volunteering opportunities given COVID-19. So one in particular is are we 

required to [indiscernible] COVID-19 stations and volunteer opportunities?

>> I can't tell you what you can propose on your application but there is 

Appendix B and the work plan development worksheets which have the 
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allowable output and outcome pairings. You can determine a station that can 

serve to meet the outcome pairings. 

>> Question is I see a funding opportunity for 75,000 starting April 1 in my area, 

does this mean the opportunity for funding has passed?

>> So the awards that are made through this competition which start in 2021 so 

April 1, 2021 or July 1, 2021.

>> Another question -- does this mean that any station of volunteers placed that 

some its outcome based work plans that the stations count as evidence-based?

>> Not necessarily. Evidence-based work plans or evidence-based programs 

are programs that I hate to use evidence-based to define it but that are evidencebased. So you can have a work plan that's evidence-based using our outputs and 

outcomes. You could have a program that is not evidence-based with our outputs 

and outcomes. But I would recommend in the NOFO, there's more information 

about evidence-based programming and I believe there's a link to an evidencebased registry where you could see different things that have been done before.

>> Another question is what is the smallest size organization that has received 

one of these grants in terms of numbers of employees of the organization?

>> Not sure that I know the answer to that. I know we have a diverse array of 

organizations from small nonprofit, mom-and-pop, to bigger national organization 

so really we have sponsors that fall anywhere in between.

>> Just a reminder if you have questions, enter them in the Q&A box and we will 

try to get them answered before the end of the call but questions in the chat are 

hard to manage so please enter them into Q&A pod.

>> Thank you so much Amy, there are sponsored projects and I know of one in 

her state that is just the RSVP director and assistant. I saw another question that 

asked about multiple applications. So if you are in service area or [indiscernible] 

service areas and you want to apply for both, applicants -- applicants may apply 

to as many opportunities as they wish provided they are able to demonstrate 

sufficient local knowledge and presence but you need to submit separate 
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applications for each opportunity. So you can't just tie everything into one 

application. It's a separate application for each opportunity on Appendix A.

>> Another question is -- what the SeniorCorps provide by way of support?

>> Other than funds, if you're given the award, you will have a portfolio manager 

in one of our local regional offices who will be supporting you and from the 

SeniorCorps headquarters office, we provide trainings and guidance.

>> Another one about criminal history check, question is, RSVP volunteers do 

not need to pass criminal history background check, only paid staff of the RSVP 

program?

>> Yes, that's correct so RSVP volunteers do not need to go through CNCS 

National Service criminal history check so it's just a paid staff that needs to go 

through that. I have seen -- sorry, Courtney, go ahead.

>> Can you go over service areas again and I have a question that says how do 

you choose our service area if we serve the entire county or the entire 

[indiscernible] but are based in specific city, is the service area city of 

headquarters?

>> No, your service area would be where you would be expected to serve all the 

counties that were a part of the geographic service area. You would be expected 

by SeniorCorps to serve all of the areas under areas affected regardless of 

where or what county your headquarters would be. I will add the same applies if 

you are an organization that wants to apply to an opportunity, but your 

headquarters may be is located outside of the geographic service area, you can 

still apply but just know that if awarded the project must serve the geographic 

service area exactly as it's described in Appendix A.

>> One last question is can our current volunteers sign up for RSVP and still be 

considered as a volunteer?

>> Say it again, sorry.

>> Can our current volunteers sign up for RSVP and still be considered as a 

volunteer?
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>> If your organization is awarded the grant and you decide to make your 

organization also the station, you can decide to program whoever you want as 

long as they are 55 and older into those work plans. I see a match question. 

Organizations say are new to a geographic service area, organizations if 

awarded would be expected to have 10% match in the first year? If you are 

incumbent of geographic service area so you currently serve a geographic 

service area and you are awarded the grant again, you would be expected to 

have a 30% match. If you are incumbent grantee and you apply to a new 

geographic service area and that new geographic service area, you would go 

back down to the 10% match.

>> Another question on Appendix A, why are some of the opportunities 

highlighted in yellow?

>> Good question -- opportunities highlighted in yellow are opportunities that 

were added or updated after the initial posting on July 1.

>> Is the initial award the amount listed on the RSVP or is it split by three, due to 

three years? So I can answer this one. The initial award is the amount listed on 

Appendix A that is the amount that you receive every year. So if the area is listed 

at $50,000, you would receive 50,000 based on appropriation every year for 

those, for the three year cycle.

>> I want to respect everyone's time this afternoon. As there may be one or two 

more questions that we can answer before we log off today, Courtney? Are there 

a couple more questions we can answer, Courtney?

>> Can we go over Appendix A one more time? There's a couple more 

questions about Appendix A and the service area..

>> Sure, let me go back to the beginning of the slides. Sorry, that took a long 

time. Can you repeat the questions, Courtney?

>> Just clarifying what the listing and how applications should be submitted for 

the service area and the volunteer number?

>> Let's say you are interested in this opportunity. When you apply, you apply 

for the $141,000. That number of unduplicated volunteers and they will serve in 
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the areas affected listed on Appendix A. To make it more complicated, we have 

performance measure requirements and the cost per unduplicated volunteers 

says that for every $1000 in federal funding that you received, you must program 

and unduplicated, single volunteer in a work plan that results in national 

performance measure outcomes. Of the number of unduplicated volunteers on 

Appendix A, your annual federal funding divided by $1000 must be programmed 

into national performance measure, into a work plan that results into a work plan 

outcome and remaining volunteers may be programmed into other community 

priorities work plan. We will go into more detail between national performance 

measures and other community priorities I think next week, July 21 during our 

national performance measure session. But when you apply, you up -- you are 

applying to the package of these three things. I saw a question that asked if you 

need to currently have this number of volunteers at your organization. You don't 

have to currently have that number volunteers but when you are applying, your 

planning or showing us that you will recruit to have that total number of 

volunteers. All right. Any other questions, Courtney? One more for the good of 

the group? I know we are little over.

>> I don't think so.

>> All right, thank you everyone for joining us today. I hope you learned a little 

bit of something about CNCS, SeniorCorps and the RSVP program. We are 

excited to welcome you into the National Service family and look forward to 

spending the next few weeks with you going through this cycle of webinars. I will 

see you on Wednesday. Have a great afternoon!

[End of session]