Dfc Grantee Training - Terms and conditions

SAMHSA CONFERENCE CALL - 9334360: PARTICIPANTS: Jerry Campbell, Tom Deloe, Lieutenant JG Helen Hernandez Operator: Excuse me. This is the operator. I just need to inform you that today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect your line at this time. And you may begin. Campbell: Good afternoon, and congratulations on being awarded a new DFC grant for Fiscal Year 2011. We're excited that you're a part of the DFC family, and we look forward to great years ahead as we work together to change communities and save lives. My name is Jerry Campbell, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to -Terms and Conditions: What You Need to Know.- This is the second of a three-part series of webinars hosted by SAMHSA's Division of Grants Management and the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention. But before we get into today's presentations, on behalf of SAMHSA and the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, we want to take the opportunity to thank you for your desire to become instruments of change for your communities. The task that you and your coalitions have undertaken is not an easy task, but it is a task where the fruit of your labor will become evident now and in years to come. During the course of your award, you will be required to provide data on a number of substance and alcohol related topics that affect your communities. These may include: the number of teens who think that smoking, drinking alcohol, or marijuana use is no big deal, or the number of times local liquor stores have sold liquor to under age youth. That is the story behind these decisions that affect our communities most, by seeing how smoking being a gateway to other drugs has opened doors for more illicit drug use among a friend's or family member's teenaged child, or due to a merchant selling alcohol to an under aged youth, who is now intoxicated and behind the wheel of her family's car, crashes and kills her best friend and herself. These are the types of stories that give face to the issue of creating drug-free communities and moves us to action. So we here at SAMHSA, along with our partners, thank you for standing up and taking the challenge to become champions and change agents for our communities, for our youth. These next two webinar presentations presented by CSAP is about creating next steps and preparing coalitions to succeed in moving their communities' vision forward. During these webinars, CSAP's goal is to provide grantees with a brief overview of the award, along with tips, recommendations, and expectations on how you can begin to successfully plan on the administration and implementation of your grant. More detailed information about DFC's support programs, including workshops and recommendations on the how to phase, will, during the two and a half of new grantee meeting scheduled Monday, December 5 through Wednesday, December 7 of this year. In an effort to assist, CSAP has provided the following timeline leading up to the new grantee meeting. Included are grant management webinar presented October 4th, the second that's going on now, an upcoming webinar, and, of course, the new grantee meeting. If I could take one underlying message and have you to understand, it would be that grants management and their specialists, and the project officers are here to support you in achieving your coalition's objectives, which are directly tied to the DFC's primary goal. During this webinar presentation, the following topics will be covered: an overview of the DFC support programs, accessing your terms and conditions. Roles and responsibilities of the grantee and statutory requirements will be presented by Dr. Thomas Deloe. Restrictions on grantee lobbying and special terms of the award will be presented by Lieutenant JG Helen Hernandez. And following that will be standard terms of the award, also presented Thomas Deloe. Afterwards, we'll have a question/answer session. In the invitation, we suggested participants have read and have copies of their specific terms and conditions in front of them as a reference. However, we do understand that some of you may not have had that opportunity. Therefore, CSAP has provided a hyperlink where you can access your specific grant's terms and conditions. For those of you who need to obtain copies of your terms and conditions, you may highlight your specific grant, right click the mouse, and go to "open hyperlink." There you should be able to access terms and conditions for your grant. In addition, throughout the webinar series, I'll reference hyperlinks that you may open for your review and reference. The purpose of this webinar is threefold: one, to provide grantees with information on SAMHSA's and CSAP's expectations in the programmatic administration of the award. What this simply means is getting your organizational and creative juices flowing in developing and/or strengthening systems to implement your DFC grant effectively and efficiently. CSAP also wants you to understand that while each project officer is different, there is a commonality of work, meaning you will not be asked to go outside the realms of your grant's terms and conditions. Secondly, we want to remind grantees of the next webinar session and new grantee meeting. The Center's purpose here is to help support your efforts by reminding you of important dates that are designed to help you move to the next stage of implementing your grant. As examples, the next webinar session is scheduled for November 1st, and, of course, the new grantee meeting scheduled for December 5. Many of you may have already received correspondence requesting registration for the new grantee meeting. If so, please respond accordingly. For more information on key dates, please refer to the new grantee orientation timeline. CSAP supports your efforts in establishing drug free communities and recognize that many of you have questions that need answers. Therefore, the Center encourages your questions with the intent that answers will lead to your coalition's next steps. So, during these sessions, participants will have access to the Net Conference Q&A tool. This tool will be used by participants to ask questions online. When using the net conference question and answer tool, participants will click on the Q&A button on the meeting console. A new window will pop open for an individual to type their question into the white area at the top. You will then press -ask.- Your question has now been submitted. Questions will be answered at the end of the presentation. Enacted by Congress in 1997, the Drug Free Communities Program, known as DFC, is a collaborative effort between the Office of National Drug Control Policy and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, known as SAMHSA. For the full Drug Free Communities Act, you may go on DCP's website, and in the search box, type in "Drug Free Communities Act of 1997." This will bring your request up for your review, and you may also print it, should you desire to do so. According to the Drug Free Communities Act of 1997, the purpose of DFC's funding is to address two primary goals. They are, one, to establish and strengthen collaboration among communities, public and private non-profit agencies, and Federal, State, and tribal governments to support the efforts of community coalitions, and, secondly, to reduce substance abuse among youth and, over time, among adults. As stated earlier, your coalition's efforts should be tied directly to these two primary goals. The purpose of the DFC Mentoring Program is to encourage the development of new, self-supporting community coalitions that are focused on the prevention of youth substance use in the new community. The Mentoring Program is an initiative of DFC and supports the program's goals. Mentoring grantees may receive up to two years of funding in preparing coalitions and new communities to apply for DFC funds. This concludes my portion of the presentation. Now, I would like to turn it over to Dr. Thomas Deloe. Deloe: Thank you, Jerry. Before we begin, I'd like to talk to you about some organizations that are critical and key in the administration of your Drug Free Communities Program. They are the partners with you in this grant administration. The first one is the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and they have the overall responsibility for Drug Free Communities Program. However, as part of their legal authority, the Office of National Drug Control Policy cannot actually administer a program, and so, therefore, they subcontract those services to the organization in which the people that are giving this webinar are affiliated with today. And we are affiliated with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, so we are actually administering the Drug Free Communities Program for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. The third organization that you'll become aware of is ICF International. ICF International is the contractor assigned to perform the cross-site evaluation of the Drug Free Communities Program. And the last organization, some of you may already be familiar with, is the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, or CADCA. And they provide training and technical assistance through a contract with SAMHSA for the Drug Free Communities Program. In terms of roles and responsibilities, I do want to talk to you about three different concepts and make sure that you have those concepts distinctly in your mind and their differences. The first is the grantee, and the grantee is the actual organization that is receiving the funds for the Drug Free Communities Program. They were the actual applicant that applied for the program. Sometimes you'll hear a grantee referred to as a fiscal agent. We've been trying to get away from that term recently, but the residual of it is still in effect, so sometimes you'll hear a grantee referred to as a fiscal agent. The other concept is a coalition, and, of course, we are the Drug Free Communities, and we are funding coalitions. And a coalition may be a grantee, but may not be a grantee. A grantee organization may be subgranting or subcontracting their program activities to coalition members, and so, therefore, a coalition may or may not be a grantee. The coalition itself must have a have representation from each of these 12 sectors that are listed here in this Power Point slide, and the reason for that is this. Well, the reason is twofold. One is that, of course, it's a legal requirement within the law, so that it's important to you to know that if for some reason, some sector representative happens to leave a coalition and a vacancy is created, it's important for you to immediately try to replace that vacancy because of the legal requirement. But there's another reason, too. Congress realized that combating substance abuse requires all of these sectors of the community coming together to plan and implement programs and activities to reduce substance abuse. Two other statutory requirements are a mission statement and strategic plan. All coalitions must have a mission statement, and that mission statement must include a statement which actually states that your purpose and mission is to reduce substance abuse, and specifically youth substance abuse. Also, each coalition must have a strategic plan, and that strategic plan must address activities and programs that are designed to reduce substance use in your community. In terms of other program statutory requirements, the DFC Program, in terms of Federal funding, a coalition is eligible to receive funds for up to 10 years. However, those 10 years are divided into two grant cycles. Right now, you are in the first year of the five-year grant cycle, so you're in the first cycle. And that first cycle, you have already competed for your grant, and so you'll receive this grant, plus four more years in a noncompeting status. To get through the second cycle from years five to six, there's actually another competitive process. If you choose, and if you're chosen, then you will receive a year six grant, and you can actually receive up to 10 years of funding for drug free communities activities. Now, if you're a mentoring grant and you're listening to this now, mentoring grants are only for up to a two-year grant period. One of the other requirements of coalitions is that you have to have to do meeting minutes, meaning that members have to be actively involved in the actual coalition process. The purpose of this grant is to make sure that all sectors of the community are, in fact, planning and implementing programs, that this is not a staff driven operation, but rather a coalition sector involvement, planning and implementation process. As part of your coalition, you must address multiple drugs. And you must have an action plan with unique logic models for each of the drugs that you address in terms of your strategic plan. Now, many of you are going to learn more about logic modeling in the Coalition Academy, which I imagine most of you are signing up for right now. Also, there's the four core measure requirement, which our subsequent presenter will also present to you about the request requirements of the four core measures. However, I will say to you that ICF International are the individuals you want to talk to about those four core measures. This next slide gives both their e-mail address and their hotline address. On October 31 at 2:00, ICF is providing a webinar on evaluation requirements, so you may want to get a copy or a recording of that webinar. Right now, I'd like to turn this presentation over to Lieutenant JG Helen Hernandez, who will continue to talk to you about other requirements of the Drug Free Communities Program. Lieutenant JG Hernandez: Good afternoon, grantees, and congratulations on your award. I'm Lieutenant JG Helen Hernandez, and I would like to quickly go over a section of your terms and conditions that provides you with the legislation on the restrictions for using Federal funds towards lobbying, and hopefully clarify that huge chunk of words into something you and your coalitions can really understand, and help you by providing you with an alternative. The Drug Free Communities Support Program and the DFC Mentoring Program have a restriction on grantee lobbying with grant funds, and any matching money that an organization raises to obtain Federal funding comes under the same prohibition as the Federal money itself. However, this isn't meant to scare or intimidate you, because coalitions are powerful and uniquely positioned to achieve community change, specifically modifying and changing policies in their community. Lobbying is the practice of trying to persuade legislators to propose, pass, or defeat a specific legislative proposal. For example, coalition members meeting with a legislator to discuss Bill 123.45 about happy hour specials in your community is considered lobbying. Coalitions cannot lobby with Federal funds. However, you are allowed to advocate. So, the DFC grant and the DFC mentoring grant have no restrictions on grantee advocacy with Federal funds. Advocacy is strategies devised, actions taken, and solutions proposed to influence decision makers at the local and State level to create positive change for the people and their environment. Activities that are considered advocacy include sending information, outcomes, and other successes about your coalition to legislators, and educating your legislators about problems and issues in your community that need to be addressed, for example, using your most common needs assessment. Advocacy is important and encouraged within the DFC Program. Seeking to change the environment where youth alcohol and drug use occur often involve advocating for change or the creation of public policy. As DFC grantees, it's important that you abide by the rules and not be intimidated or fearful of the rules. It's important that you understand the rules. Whenever in doubt, contact your government project officer, and have a discussion with him. You're going to hear multiple times during this presentation to contact your government project officer. You can find who your government project officer is by looking at your notice of grant award, and you'll find their name and contact information listed at the bottom left of the page. Now, on this slide I have identified three resources that are available to you that will assist you as you and your coalition begin the discussion about advocacy. The first two booklets listed on this slide were developed by CADCA, which you heard Dr. Thomas Deloe discuss briefly about. These two resources have been hyperlinked for your convenience. If you click on the blue text, you will automatically be taken to the PDF versions of these resources. So, the first booklet, titled Implementation Primer: Putting Your Plan Into Action, you want to refer to pages 21 through 25 to read about what advocacy is and what it isn't. Strategizer 31 is going to provide you with important guidelines for advocacy. The third resource is your SAMHSA government project officer, and I have provided you with a link that will take you directly to a listing of all the government project officers with their contact information and their current State assignments. You can also, again, identify who your government project officer is by looking at your notice of grant award. Now, I'd like to discuss CADCA's National Coalition Academy. The National Coalition Academy is a comprehensive training program developed by CADCA's National Coalition Institute. The Academy is a year-long training program that includes three separate week long training sessions. The NCA, the National Coalition Academy, combines three weeks of classroom training, along with distance learning and access to a web based workstation. Year one DFC grantees are required to register and attend an Academy session during the first year of funding. Mentoring grantees, your mentee coalitions that are being mentored for the full two-year term are required to enroll in the NCA at some point during the mentoring grant. Mentee coalitions only mentored for one year are encouraged to attend, but are not required. Many of you may have already registered for the Academy, and if you haven't, the third bullet provides you with the link of the Fiscal Year 2012 Academy application that can be accessed online. Each grantee is required to attend and send two people to the Academy. I have hyperlinked this application for you for your convenience. Slides for today's webinar will also be e-mailed to all on the call. So, on this next slide, I'm providing you with the National Coalition Academy's current schedule. If you haven't registered already, you want to do so soon because these locations tend to fill up quickly. So, CADCA's Coalition Academy, once you submit your application, and you're going to submit your application to Nancy Roy at nroy@cadcaorg. You can also fax your application to (703) 706-0565. Any questions that you may have about the Academy, the application, or Academy locations that are still available to you should also be directed to Nancy Roy by calling her directly at 1 (800) 542-2322, extension 225. All right. So, let's discuss some special terms of the award. Both the DFC and mentoring grantees will find 10 special terms and conditions to your DFC award. It is important that you read and you understand all of these because as a grantee, you are required to adhere to these terms and conditions, and failure to do so or to comply by the terms and conditions of your award can actually result in disciplinary action. So, today I'm only going to focus on three. The first is budgeting for two people to attend a two-day training that may be called by ONDCP. For year one, year six, and new mentoring grantees, this meeting will be the new grantee meeting that takes place in Washington, D.C. These should have received information or call from SAMHSA project officers about this new grantee meeting last week. In case you haven't received information about the new grantee meeting, I've provided you with this slide. The purpose of the new grantee meeting is to assist all new grantees in getting off to a great start for the first five years, and ensuring that they understand all the resources that are available to you to help you and your coalition succeed as DFC grantees and as a community coalition. At the new grantee meeting, you also have a chance to meet with your government project officer. The new grantee meeting will be taking place December 5th through December 7th at the Grand Hyatt Washington in Washington, D.C. Registration will begin at 7:30 am on Monday morning, and the last workshop on Wednesday will end at 1:00 pm, so please make sure that you arrange your travel to accommodate staying for all of the sessions. Year one and year six grantees, we recommend that you send the person who will lead the day-to-day efforts of the coalition, and the second person can be the person in charge of the financial aspects of the grant, a coalition board member, or anyone else from the coalition whom you feel would benefit from the new grantee meeting. Mentoring grantees, you must bring one person from the mentor coalition and one person from the mentee coalition. If you are mentoring two coalitions, then you would bring one person from each mentee coalition, for a total of three people. Please make sure you register by November 18th by clicking on the link provided on this slide. All attendees must be registered by November 18th. If you still have more questions about the new grantee meeting, please do not hesitate to contact your government project officer, and they can help you with the registration process. So, let's move on to special term and condition number three, compliance with the DFC national evaluation. ONDCP requires that all grantees collect data specific to the geographic area designated in the approved application. Grantees may use local surveys to collect on the required four core measures, and the four core measures are: age of onset, 30-day use, perception of risk or harm, and perception of parent disapproval. The data collection size must be sufficient to provide an accurate and meaningful statistical representation. The data must be collected every two years on alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana for three grade levels, grades between sixth and 12th grades. DFC mentoring grantees are required to assist the mentee coalition in developing baseline data regarding youth substance use in the mentee community by also collecting the four core measures I just described. The data is collected through the COMET system, which you will learn more about at the new grantee meeting. And you want to refer to your terms and conditions for reporting deadlines. In general, DFC grantees report twice a year, and mentoring grantees report one time per year. But for the specific dates, please go to your notice of grant award and your terms and conditions. Special term and condition number eight, participation of lead paid staff on the DFC workstation. So, there are going to be times when ONDCP as an organization and Federal entity has information that would benefit communities and specific sectors within the communities. In addition, all of the partners that serve the DFC program, such as SAMHSA, CADCA, and the National Coalition Institute, have programs and efforts that DFC grantees need to know about and may actually want to participate in. So, we use the DFC workstation to communicate with you in a timely manner. E-mails sent over the DFC workstation are considered high priority by the DFC Program, and are something that we feel that you need to do or act upon quickly. We do not send arbitrary information to you and your sector representatives. Now, in your terms and conditions, one member from each of the required 12 sectors must join the workstation. If you haven't registered for the workstation, please do so at the website listed at the bottom of this slide. You will also learn more about the DFC workstation, what it is and what it isn't, at the new grantee meeting. That's it for me. I want to thank all of you again for your commitment to your youth in your community. I will now pass it on to Dr. Thomas Deloe, who will discuss some standards terms of the award. Tom? Dr. Deloe: Good afternoon again. Yes, I'm going to go over some of the standard terms of the award. There's actually 22 of these standard terms, but I'm only going to go over six of them. Again, of course responsible for all of them, so if you have questions about any of them, you can always call your project officer, and he or she will be more than willing to do discuss them with you. In terms of the terms and conditions in Section 3, you see that you can click on the blue "here," here, and those terms and conditions will come up. In terms of some of the ones that I want to go over, number two states that the grantee organization is legally and financially responsible for all aspects of this grant. Well, I think all of you know that. But what that says is, keep good records because you will receive, probably during the course of your time, a site visit from your government project officer, and it's possible that you might receive further financial audits or those kinds of things. So keeping good records is a very important aspect of this grant. Grant funds also may not be used to supplant funding. What does that mean? Well, actually what that means is if you have a particular activity, program, whatnot, that is funded by either State or local funds at present, and you receive this Federal funding, you cannot replace those State and local funds with Federal funds. The State and local funds must continue to fund that particular aspect of your program. Number six, is awardees must maintain financial records, and they could be reviewed on side by SAMHSA project officers. So, what you should do here is keep separate files for this particular grant so that they're easily accessible. And we've given some examples of some of the things that those records should contain, such things as sub-grant awards, matching funds, liabilities, outlays, et cetera. On October 4th, our Division of Grants Management did a financial issues webinar. We will send you slides of that particular webinar, and some of the financial information contained in there might be of some interest to you in terms of setting up files and setting up the financial aspects of this program. Number 10 of the standard terms and conditions talks about prior approval for certain actions that your grant may want to take. Some of those things that require prior approval are changing staff, changing the scope of the program, or budget revisions or modifications. Those are aspects of the program that you're going to have to work with your government project officer on those requests. As an example is number 11. The project coordinator and the project director are considered key staff, so hiring those staff, or if you're replacing those staff or increasing their hours in any way, all require prior approval of SAMHSA's grants management system and your government project officer. So, you need to submit both a resume and position description of those particular job descriptions and your proposed individual that you want to obtain those positions to us for prior approval. I would make a note to you at this point, if at all possible, the new grantee meeting is December 5th, 6th, and 7th. It's advantageous to you if you can get your new staff person on board prior to that time. So, if you make every effort to try to do that, I think you'll find that beneficial because that individual can then use the new grantee meeting as an orientation to the Drug Free Communities Program. As the last slide on this particular presentation, we've got the website where you can get contact information about your government project officer. Thank you very much. Again, congratulations on the awarding of your grants. We look forward to working with you in the next two years. We're here to help you. Take care, and have a good day. Operator, we're done with our presentation [Whereupon, the conference call concluded.]