The Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) promotes coordination of NRCS conservation activities with partners that offer value-added contributions to expand our collective ability to address on-farm, watershed, and regional natural resource concerns. Through RCPP, NRCS seeks to co-invest with partners to implement projects that demonstrate innovative solutions to conservation challenges and provide measurable improvements and outcomes tied to the resource concerns they seek to address.
Donor Name: U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)
State: All States
County: All Counties
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline (mm/dd/yyyy): 04/13/2022
Grant Size: $250,000
Details:
RCPP is an innovative program that has as its critical feature a co-investment approach through which NRCS and partners collaborate to implement natural resource conservation activities.
Priorities
- Climate-Smart Agriculture: NRCS intends to award a significant portion of the available funding to proposals that include Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry approaches, systems, and practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon.
- Urban Agriculture: NRCS also strongly encourages the submission of RCPP proposals addressing the conservation needs of urban farmers in metropolitan areas. Interest in urban agriculture continues to grow. Urban farmers face unique natural resource concerns related to energy conservation, water conservation, soil health, and the long-term protection of land.
- Racial Justice & Equity: For the history of the United States, and the history of the USDA, too many Black, Indigenous and People of Color farmers have faced discrimination—sometimes overt and sometimes through deeply embedded rules and policies.
Key Principles
Following are four key principles of RCPP:
- Impact—RCPP proposals must propose effective and compelling solutions that address one or more natural resource concern to help solve natural resource challenges. Partners are responsible for evaluating a project’s impact and results.
- Partner Contributions—Partners are responsible for identifying any combination of cash and in-kind value-added contributions to leverage NRCS’s RCPP investments. It is NRCS’s goal that partner contributions at least equal the NRCS investment in an RCPP project.
- Innovation—NRCS seeks projects that integrate multiple conservation approaches, implement innovative conservation approaches or technologies, build new partnerships, or effectively take advantage of program flexibilities to deliver conservation solutions.
- Partnerships and Management—Partners must have experience, expertise, and capacity to manage the partnership and project, provide outreach to producers, and quantify the environmental (and when possible, economic and social) outcomes of an RCPP project. RCPP ranking criteria give priority consideration to applicants that meaningfully engage historically underserved farmers and ranchers.
Funding Information
- The maximum RCPP funding available for any project (combined financial and technical assistance) selected under this announcement is $10 million.
- The minimum funding amount for an RCPP project is $250,000.
Eligibility Criteria
Entities that are classified as one of the following organizational types can serve as an eligible RCPP partner:
- An agricultural or silvicultural producer association or other group of producers.
- A State or unit of local government.
- An Indian Tribe.
- A farmer cooperative.
- A water district, irrigation district, acequia, rural water district or association, or other organization with specific water delivery authority to agricultural producers.
- A municipal water or wastewater treatment entity.
- An institution of higher education.
- An organization or entity with an established history of working cooperatively with producers on agricultural land, as determined by NRCS, to address:
- Local conservation priorities related to agricultural production, wildlife habitat development, or nonindustrial private forest land management; or
- Critical watershed-scale soil erosion, water quality, sediment reduction, or other natural resource issues.
- An entity, such as an Indian Tribe, State government, local government, or a nongovernmental organization that has a farmland or grassland protection program that purchases agricultural land easements.
- A conservation district. Eligible partners can serve as a lead partner.
Each project must have a single lead partner, which is the entity that submits an RCPP proposal and negotiates a PPA with NRCS. The lead partner is ultimately responsible for ensuring completion of project deliverables, delivering all partner contributions, and assessing project outcomes.
Eligible partners, whether the lead partner or not, may be awarded a supplemental agreement, as agreed to in the PPA, to carry out technical assistance activities, facilitate the conveyance of an easement to an eligible entity by a producer, implement an eligible watershed operations activity, or facilitate the implementation of an eligible activity as determined by NRCS. Partners holding supplemental agreement awards assume responsibility for all deliverables under such awards.
For more information, visit Grants.gov.
