FY24 School Foodservice Workforce | USDA FNS OPS SFWS 24

Opportunity Information: Apply for USDA FNS OPS SFWS 24

The FY24 School Foodservice Workforce grant opportunity (Funding Opportunity Number: USDA FNS OPS SFWS 24) is a discretionary funding opportunity offered by the USDA Food and Nutrition Service (FNS). It is structured as a cooperative agreement, which typically means the federal agency expects to have substantial involvement during the project period (for example, collaborating on the research approach, reviewing deliverables, or helping shape dissemination). The overall purpose of the award is to fund research that builds a clearer, evidence-based understanding of the school foodservice workforce, with a particular emphasis on worker satisfaction, day-to-day workforce experience, and training and professional development.

The work supported under this RFA is research-focused and aims to generate practical information that can help stakeholders understand how school foodservice jobs function and how the workforce can be strengthened. The announcement highlights several example research areas. One major theme is mapping and describing career pathways within school foodservice, including what training and skill-building opportunities exist, whether there are realistic promotion ladders, and what retention and tenure patterns look like, both within a given employer and across the broader school foodservice industry. Another theme is identifying the skills used on the job by different roles, paired with analysis of how transferable those skills are to other industries, which can help explain recruitment and retention pressures as well as opportunities for professionalization. The RFA also calls for assessing worker satisfaction and workplace conditions, including both perception-based measures (how workers feel about their work environment) and objective measures (observable or documented conditions). Finally, the opportunity explicitly encourages examining how these factors differ across job roles, demographic groups, school and School Food Authority (SFA) characteristics, and geographic contexts, recognizing that workforce challenges and experiences are not uniform across settings.

Eligibility is limited to organizations with established research capacity. Applicants may include accredited institutions of higher education (colleges and universities), nonprofit research entities, and other nonprofit organizations that can document experience in public health research and communications. Nonprofit applicants must have verified 501(c)(3) status. The funding activity category is Food and Nutrition and the associated CFDA number is 10.579, which places it within USDA FNS assistance programs.

In terms of scale and competitiveness, the opportunity anticipates making a single award (Expected Awards: 1) with an award ceiling of $1,500,000. The original application closing date listed for this funding opportunity is February 9, 2024, and the opportunity was created on December 8, 2023. Taken together, this is a relatively large, single-award research cooperative agreement aimed at producing actionable findings about the school foodservice workforce, including how to better support, train, and retain workers and how workforce experiences vary across different contexts.

• The Food and Nutrition Service in the food and nutrition sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "FY24 School Foodservice Workforce" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 10.579.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2023-12-08.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2024-02-09. (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 $1,500,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 1 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Others.

Apply for USDA FNS OPS SFWS 24

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