"I can write about anything!"™

 

 

 

Homeland Defense Journal, October 2005

These can be scary times for all of us, but few of us get a chance to do much about it. When a colleague from a list of DC-based publications professionals (yee-ha, networking, again!) contacted me about writing this article, I was a bit hesitant, but it felt like a good thing to do. There was a lot of bureaucratic jargon in the resource materials; I cut through it and ended up with a readable story packed with useful information.

Federal Grants Abound for
Homeland Security Programs

By Ruth E. Thaler-Carter

Thanks to a little-known aspect of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), local communities and agencies have more options for financial assistance in beefing up their homeland security efforts than they might realize. A wide variety of federal grant funds for security is accessible to state, local and tribal organizations; colleges and universities; not-for-profit organizations, research institutions and other organizations – more than 1,000 grant programs representing $400 billion in annual funds from 26 federal agencies. And not only are there more funds available than generally known, but finding out about and applying for those funds is much easier than in the past as well.

DHS offers several hundred related grants, all aimed at enhancing “the capability of state and local government units to prevent, deter, respond to and recover from incidents of terrorism involving the use of chemical, biological, radioactive, nuclear and explosive (CBRNE) weapons and cyber attacks.” The grant program supports the DHS mission of preventing terrorist attacks with the United states, reducing vulnerability to terrorism, and minimizing damage not only from potential attacks but from natural disasters as well.