One of the most important things we do in workforce development at the Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) is develop partnerships. Millions of dollars of taxpayer dollars flow from DEED to nonprofit partners in workforce development across Minnesota every year. These organizations work hard to help get Minnesotans into our workforce.

Making sure we’re great partners to these nonprofits is an important priority of ours at DEED, which is why we’re revamping our process for grants administration under the Walz/Flanagan Administration. We’ve heard from many partners that DEED has been too onerous in our grants management, and that the process is too complex.

We listened and are working to make improvements.

Last year, we announced several changes to our RFP process that resulted in a record amount of outreach and community engagement from DEED, and the selection of competitive grant winners five months faster than ever before.

Today, we’re announcing a new series of changes to how we support our grantees throughout the life of a grant. Our goal is to provide the right level of accountability that ensures taxpayer dollars are spent wisely, while empowering our partners to spend more time delivering on their work plans and less time filling out unnecessary paper work.

And importantly, we’re cleaning up our requirements to ensure that we don’t apply federal guidelines to grants that come from state money.

The process improvements we’re making are founded on improving efficiency, agility, and clarity in how we provide support services to grantees. While many of these changes are quite detailed, we want to share them all here to ensure transparency to all grantees.

Efficiency

We want our partners to spend more time delivering services and less time filling out unnecessary paperwork. Therefore:

• We are no longer issuing a fiscal capacity guide for grantees to fill out; as we get that same information when we do a risk assessment of a grantee.
• We no longer require grantees to give supporting documentation for monthly reimbursement payment requests. This was never a necessary step and removing it saves you time.
• We are no longer looking at all the RPRs for a full quarter, but rather check one month of financial documentation to ensure you’re on the right track (we do reserve the right to conduct random reconciliations should there be reasonable cause to do so).
• We are no longer mandating that all nonprofits submit a general ledger for the first three months of the grant, unless our risk assessment concludes it would be prudent.

Agility

Different partners need different support services, based on their experience in managing a state grant. And we should be nimble enough to use state policy for state grants, and federal policy for federal grants. Therefore:

• We will give new organizations extra support in the first 3-6 months to ensure they are in compliance with statutory standards, and we reduce the possibility of error.
• For low-risk grantees (grantees we’ve worked with before), we’ll only audit your grant at the end of the grant-making period.
• We will adhere to state standards for support on state grants, rather than default to federal standards. For example, we used to ask for all the RPRs every quarter, now we’re following state policy:
  • Risk Assessments are not needed for grants $25,000 and under. (OGM Policy 08-06)
  • Risk Assessments are not needed for government grantees. (OGM Policy 08-06)
  • Grant support and financial reconciliation are not needed for grants $50,000 and under. (OGM policy 08-10)
  • Annual support visit is required for grants over $250,000. (OGM policy 08-10)

Clarity

We want to make sure our process and policy decisions are crystal clear, and grantees have plenty of time to review them. Therefore:

• We’re starting to send our risk assessments when we issue the RFP, to save time and provide a heads-up on what we’ll judge in those assessments.
• We’re taking a new approach to cash advances, which we issue only in the case of a nonprofit that needs funding up front to complete the work. This clarity will also lead to speedier decision-making by the agency.
  • If the request is less than 10% of the grant amount, our employment & training director will approve.
  • If the request is more than 10% of the grant amount, our Deputy Commissioner for Workforce will approve.
  • If the request is for more that 50% of the grant amount, it will go to the Commissioner.

We hope these changes answer the call you gave to us to clean up and improve our grant support services.

So, what’s next in our effort to reform how DEED administers grants to our partners?

We’ll soon shift our attention to performance measurement. We believe true accountability in grant-making should not focus on documentation, but on outcomes. So we’ve been working with several local and national experts on performance measurement for workforce development, and are excited to share what we’re learning in the coming months.

Stay tuned here for more.

- Deputy Commissioner Hamse Warfa