Reframing federal grant narratives

This year has ushered in unprecedented and sweeping changes to the federal grant landscape, with the Trump administration reversing years of progress on climate, equity, and clean energy. For your climate startup to stand a chance of winning funding in this uncertain environment, you’ll need to think strategically and adapt your grant narrative’s language to this new grantor agenda. 

Susan Perri is Director of Grants at Climate Finance Solutions. Here, she lays out key considerations when drafting your grant application in the face of this political paradigm shift, and practical examples for adjusting your language.

Compromise on language, not impact

Along with everything else required to create a compelling and competitive grant narrative, you’ll need to put extra care into striking the right ideological tone with your choice of language. Words that would have worked in the past to describe communities’ strengths and needs and demonstrate your project’s potential are now under heightened scrutiny and can actually work against you.

To ensure critical funding continues to flow where it’s needed most, you’ll need to describe your project in a way that aligns with this shift, while maintaining the credibility of your work and without compromising on impact. With the federal government defunding existing grant programs and defaulting on awarded and obligated grant contracts, this linguistic shift is not new in adapting to changing priorities in federal government and an important strategy in a nimble grantseeking approach. 

Shifting your grant narrative’s focus

Executive orders targeting climate justice, fair labor and housing, indigenous rights, and economic development provide important context for new language to frame  your grant narrative. But crucially, projects focused on national priorities around clean energy, climate resilient public infrastructure, inclusive education and labor, health equity, and Tribal sovereignty can still win federal funding and investment in disadvantaged communities, as long as you're careful about how you articulate them.

To win hearts, minds, and money, your application should emphasize the administration-aligned outcomes of your project, including increasing or supporting:

• Access to essential services 
• Well-paying jobs
• Economic development
• Cost competitiveness
• Regional manufacturing
• Energy independence and resilience
• American innovation and the on-shore supply chain.

Avoid polarizing language 

Speak about your proposed work in simple, digestible language that any audience can connect with – regardless of their ideological bent. Steer clear of any language that could come across as divisive, rhetorical, or identity-focused. 

The dos and don’ts of writing a grant narrative now: Three examples

Example #1
🚫 This project will advance equity, civil rights, racial justice, and equal opportunity by supporting diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) throughout internal structures, policies and practices, and employee benefits. Decreasing energy burden, increasing resiliency, and increasing parity in clean energy technology access and adoption are goals built into the proposed work - strategically sited to provide benefits.

✅ Anticipated topline community benefits include advancing American energy dominance, local economic empowerment, and technology innovation. The project will build a local new energy workforce, meeting future energy and supply chain demands. It will bolster the local economy and provide development opportunities for the local workforce.

Example #2
🚫 To enhance diversity and inclusion in contracting, we will allocate a set percentage of contractual agreements to go to minority-owned businesses and new jobs to be filled by disadvantaged community residents. Additional preference will be given to contractors who utilize unionized crews. 

✅ We will seek to formalize agreements to ensure recruitment of qualified skilled labor to the project, contracting opportunities for local vendors, and community reinvestment in high priority areas.

Example #3
🚫 Much of the work on this project will be located in an area encompassing large federally recognized Native American tribal populations. Indigenous communities in particular bear a disparate burden of the risk and harms caused by climate change. 

✅ This area is characterized by higher rates of socioeconomic vulnerabilities, extreme weather events, unemployment, and lower rates of income, educational attainment, and access to jobs. It is ripe for investment and community development in the new energy economy.

Looking to the future of federal grants 

Current, large-scale attempts to restructure the federal government signal longer term implications for federal policy. However, the good news is that federal funding is making a comeback – USDA, DOT, DOJ, and other agencies are posting new funding opportunities, and will likely continue to do so through the end of the year. 

By reframing your initiatives – new or existing – with the right language, you can help ensure that those funds continue to yield the highest impacts and benefit communities historically excluded from public investment.

Susan Perri is Director of Grants at Climate Finance Solutions (CFS). She manages a team of 20+ grant developers supporting climate and clean energy technology start-ups to secure non-dilutive R&D funding to commercialize climate technologies in energy, mobility, food, nature, carbon, and industrial sectors. CFS has stewarded over $1B of government and philanthropic funding to implement project deployments in communities globally, securing U.S. federal and state, EU, Canadian, and climate philanthropy grants with a 90% practice success rate. Since 2004, Susan has secured $865+ million in public and private funding to implement 100+ high impact projects in health, environmental, economic development, education, and social services initiatives.