FY23 Microgrants -Community Policing Development Solicitation | O COPS 2023 171548

Opportunity Information: Apply for O COPS 2023 171548

The FY23 Microgrants - Community Policing Development (CPD) Solicitation is a U.S. Department of Justice COPS Office discretionary grant opportunity designed to help law enforcement agencies strengthen and modernize their community policing work through small, practical demonstration or pilot projects. The program is built around the idea that community policing is not just a set of activities, but an agency-wide approach that relies on partnerships and problem-solving to address the conditions that drive crime, disorder, and fear of crime. CPD Microgrants are meant to help agencies test innovative strategies, expand the field's knowledge of what works, and produce real-world lessons that can be shared with other agencies. Alongside crime prevention and public safety goals, the solicitation emphasizes civil rights and racial equity, trust-building, access to justice, support for victims and impacted individuals, and responding to evolving public safety threats.

Funding is offered as multiple awards with a ceiling of up to $175,000 per award, with an anticipated 28 awards under CFDA 16.710. The opportunity was created March 8, 2023, and originally closed May 1, 2023. Eligible applicants are limited to state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement agencies; applicants outside those categories are considered out of scope. The COPS Office encourages applicants to design projects that are clearly structured, evidence-informed where possible, and focused on measurable outcomes. Applicants are also expected to align proposed goals with COPS Office performance measures and, for required products, follow the COPS Office Editorial and Style Manual. For site-specific work, letters of support from targeted partner agencies are strongly encouraged, signaling that the project is collaborative and realistically implementable.

A central feature of this solicitation is that proposed projects must fit within one of five engagement areas, each reflecting current national and local challenges in policing and community safety. The first area is Community Violence Intervention (CVI), which responds to increases in community violence and gun violence and promotes a holistic approach that blends prevention, intervention, and targeted enforcement while tracking results. Competitive concepts in this area can include street outreach and violence interrupters, hospital-based violence intervention, group violence intervention strategies, and wraparound services that reduce retaliation risk and strengthen community resilience, with special attention given to gun violence intervention efforts. The second area, Officer Recruitment and Retention and Workforce Diversification, supports creative strategies to recruit and keep high-quality personnel while improving representation and diversity, including projects aligned with goals like the 30x30 Initiative (increasing women in recruit classes). Proposals in this category are expected to include quantitative measures of success and to draw on prior research, best practices, or promising practices.

The third engagement area, Hate Crimes and Domestic Extremism, funds efforts that strengthen prevention and response to bias-motivated crimes and threats tied to domestic extremism, recognizing that these incidents can harm not only direct victims but also entire communities by undermining security and trust. Agencies are encouraged to coordinate with community groups, researchers, and other justice partners and to use existing DOJ hate-crime guidance and resources when shaping project activities. The fourth area, Underserved Populations, focuses on improving safety and access to services for groups that may face barriers to protection or fair treatment, such as youth, older adults, communities of color, people experiencing homelessness, LGBTQ individuals, individuals with disabilities (including mental, intellectual, or neurodivergent disabilities), undocumented immigrants, and economically disadvantaged communities. Applications must clearly identify which population(s) the project is designed to serve and explain how the agency determined those priorities based on local conditions or data. The fifth area, Building Trust and Legitimacy with the Community, supports initiatives that deepen relationships between law enforcement and residents through meaningful engagement, restorative approaches, and community-centered partnerships, often through convenings or structured dialogues that bring together diverse community members, civic leaders, businesses, youth, and officers to set shared public safety goals.

The solicitation strongly encourages partnerships as a practical requirement of effective community policing, not as an add-on. Agencies are urged to work with nonprofit organizations, institutions of higher education, community and youth groups, faith-based organizations, and other stakeholders to plan and carry out activities. Organized dialogues and collaborative problem-solving are highlighted as a way to assess local police-community relations and create shared priorities. The COPS Office also notes that if an applicant wants to replicate a well-known program (for example, Coffee with a Cop, Police Athletic Leagues, Boys and Girls Clubs, or Explorers), the proposal must explain what makes the effort innovative, how it improves on prior work, or how it applies lessons learned rather than simply repeating a standard model.

Projects are expected to be concrete and outcome-oriented. Applicants should spell out how the activities will increase engagement, the service area and scale (for example, one agency vs. multi-agency, one population group vs. multiple), and the subject-matter expertise of project leaders and partners. A key expectation is that applicants clearly source or cite the research or promising practices behind the strategies they propose, rather than presenting activities as unsupported ideas. Just as important, applicants must define the outcomes they will report and describe how they will track progress, whether through evaluation components, metrics tied to recruitment and retention, participation and engagement measures, violence reduction indicators, or other performance measures aligned to the project type.

A distinguishing requirement of CPD Microgrants is the emphasis on deliverables that can benefit the broader policing field, not just the agency receiving funding. Each project must produce a deliverable that documents implementation, lessons learned, and promising practices in a format that can be shared widely, such as brief reports, summaries, articles, toolkits, webinars, conference presentations, videos, or podcasts. The COPS Office may also publish and distribute these products, including providing development assistance, editing, design, and distribution at no cost to the recipient. Awardees may also participate in a community of practice with other grantees, which is intended to accelerate peer learning and spread effective approaches beyond the initial project sites.

The solicitation also makes clear what it will not fund. It will not support hiring costs for new officer or deputy salaries and benefits (those needs are directed to the separate COPS Hiring Program). It will also not fund proposals that are essentially equipment or technology purchases without the broader training, programming, or services needed to make those tools meaningful within a community policing strategy. Likewise, projects that place most of the budget into generally unallowable or discouraged items, such as vehicles, food, recreational equipment, or promotional gifts and souvenirs, are deemed out of scope. Overall, the CPD Microgrants program is designed to help law enforcement agencies pilot focused, partnership-driven, evidence-informed community policing projects that produce measurable local value and transferable products for the field.

• The Department of Justice, Community Oriented Policing Services in the law, justice and legal services sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "FY23 Microgrants -Community Policing Development Solicitation" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 16.710.
• This funding opportunity was created on Mar 08, 2023.
• Applicants must submit their applications by May 01, 2023. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $175,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 28 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Others (see text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility for clarification).

Apply for O COPS 2023 171548

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