Analyzing Relationships between Disability, Rehabilitation, and Work

• Agency name: Social Security Administration (SSA)• Description:I. Program DescriptionThe Analyzing Relationships between Disability, Rehabilitation, and Work (ARDRAW) Small Grant Program supports innovative student research on rehabilitation, work, and disability topics by awarding one-year stipends to graduate-level students to conduct supervised independent research in these areas. The objective of the program is to generate innovative research with fresh perspectives on disability, and to cultivate new scholars in the field of disability research. There are two components to ARDRAW: 1) a program manager to manage the program and award stipends to individual graduate students, and 2) the graduate students who will conduct research on these disability related issues. This forecast is for the solicitation for an organization to perform grant program management duties.SSA will solicit competition from educational, policy, or research institutions to manage the grant program and distribute the stipends to graduate students for innovative research relevant to rehabilitation, work and the disability program. The SSA funded stipend will support graduate students in producing a written project that will expand knowledge and understanding of issues of interest to SSA in the administration of their disability programs. The grant program will require that the managing organization assign an individual or team to serve as program manager to coordinate the student research projects. The program manager must possess the scientific background and leadership to coordinate, supervise, and direct this disability research program. The program manager will oversee the program and the graduate students located at various organizations throughout the nation. The program manager will be responsible for the following activities: • Publicizing and disseminating information on this disability grant program to all relevant organizations across the United States, • Encouraging and recruiting graduate students to study disability issues under this program,• Developing benchmarks for increasing minority participation and diversity of applicants including outreach to minority serving institutions (MSIs), including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), • Developing guidelines for graduate students to submit proposals for funding, • Soliciting proposals from appropriate graduate students, • Assembling submitted proposals according to relevant study categories (see below for more information), • Assembling review panels with relevant complementary expertise in the areas of rehabilitation, work and disability, • Ranking these proposals according to quality of proposal and potential usefulness to the disability field, • Providing the ranked proposal abstracts to SSA for review and consultation, • Selecting the graduate students to support under this program with input from SSA, • Ensuring graduate students obtain approval (or exemption) from appropriate Institutional Review Board (IRB) for each project,• Making and administering the stipend awards to the graduate students, • Having a quarterly review of each project, including the student and his or her mentor participating, • Monitoring research progress on each project, • Reviewing each draft final report for accuracy and completeness, • Providing research products to SSA, • Maintaining a website for announcing the program and new priorities, and for containing the final accepted reports, • Submitting quarterly reports on program activities,• Collecting data for grant program evaluation, and• Submitting yearly program evaluation reports.The program manager under this grant must be designated and procedures for application, review, and award of the stipends must be in place before for the managing organization may publicize the stipends. The grant managing organization must effectively publicize the nature and intent of the program in order to obtain appropriate candidates. The program manager will critically review and rank the submitted research proposals, and collaborate with SSA on award decisions. In addition, the program manager will establish a monitoring procedure for research activity. Since the graduate students will be located throughout the country, the program manager must establish an effective monitoring system. This monitoring will focus on research activity and progress of the subsequent written analysis. We envision an award to one organization that can identify and recruit a sufficiently large number of appropriate graduate students who will be able to prepare quality proposals and perform relevant research. Organizations and universities may coordinate their efforts to compete for this grant, but there must be one central program manager. The organization must identify the target population for its outreach efforts and the size of that population. It must show evidence of prior relevant experience and the success of managing a small grant as described in the above list of activities for which the grantee will be responsible. The program manager will be responsible for transmitting the stipend to the graduate student. In the event the graduate student is unable to complete the funded research, the program manager will need to have an established procedure for recovering unexpended funds and returning these funds to SSA. Funded graduate students will conduct their research at their home university/research organization. The graduate students will be responsible for obtaining the data they need for their research analysis, computer access and any other related supplies and services. If the student wishes to provide an incentive for project participants, such as a small reimbursement (e.g., a gift card, transportation voucher, etc.), any funds used for this purpose would come from the student’s stipend award. II. Award InformationType of awardSSA expects to award one grant for a grant program management organization under this solicitation.Award amount and period of performanceThough this award is for a 5-year project, we will provide funding for this grant on a yearly basis. The grantee must submit a non-competing continuation application each of the four additional years of the agreement, subject to review and approval by SSA. Awards are contingent on availability of funds. Annual funding for this grant is $450,000, which will include funding for the program manager and graduate student stipends of $15,000 each. The grantee should plan to award up to 25 research stipends per year. If the program manager has start-up costs that will reduce the amount of money available for student stipends in the first year, those costs may not exceed 5% of the total grant and must be well documented in the proposal.
Categories: Other (see text field entitled "Explanation of Other Category of Funding Activity" for clarification).