NYS Certified Women Owned Business

The Leadership Program Helps Fulfill Your MWBE Requirement for Your Grant

To assure you qualify for the grant award, your staff must become directly responsible for functions and services related to the administration and management of the grant project. This is where we come in.

Unlike loans, grants are free money. You don’t need to pay them back, much less with interest. But asking for and receiving a grant is no easy feat. The application process can be long and tedious with a stretched waiting period. You’ll also have to meet specific requirements depending on the type of grant you apply for.

From federal and state grants to grants funded by private organizations, non-profits, or charitable foundations, your grantor will determine the qualifications and stipulations you need to follow.

Why Us?

We’re a women-owned business that seeks to help you fulfill your grant qualifications through our employee development program. Our team embodies diversity and believes in curiosity, open-mindedness, and lifelong learning. We use this methodology to empower your employees during the boardroom leadership programs.

Our staff is more than a team of consultants. We’re former teachers and current business leaders who understand the ins and outs of grant applications. We'll let you know what you can do to satisfy your MWBE requirement for your grant.

We conduct rigorous in-house testing for our programs before bringing them to you. You can trust our employee development curricula knowing we’ve already fine-tuned it with our staff. We also understand that each business has different training needs. This is why we dial into your unique needs and tailor our programs.

As a leadership program, we know that your challenges are our challenges. This is why our commitment is to provide capacity-building support to our grant applicants. This is to help them attain future sustainability for their business.

Do you want to apply for grants to grow your business? Looking for programs to help you satisfy your MWBE requirement for your grant? The Leadership Program can help. We’re an educational resource that provides effective leadership training to our grant applicants in New York State so that they can access them.

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What You Need to Know About the MWBE Requirement

New York State Executive Law Article 15-A and state regulations call for all state agencies to endorse opportunities for certified Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprises (MWBE). This Minorities and Women in Business Enterprise program was established to promote equality in state contracting. Managed by the Empire State Development’s Division of Minority and Women’s Business Development, its participation goal is 30%.

If you apply for grant contracts of $25,000 or more, you’ll be subject to New York State's MWBE requirements. You can achieve compliance through:

Full Participation
- As a preferred method of compliance, full participation means you meet and exceed the participation goals for your grant.
Partial Participation and Partial Request for Waiver
- If you’re unable to comply with full participation, try partial participation. It’s only acceptable if you make and document good faith efforts.
No Participation and Request for Complete Waiver
- Lack of participation on your part can only be satisfactory if you make and document your good faith efforts to attain full or partial participation. However, this doesn’t result in any participation by MWBE firms.
No Participation with a $0 MWBE Goal
- This technique is acceptable when all grant disbursements are in the personal service budget codes only like employee benefits and professional or support staff salaries.
Preferred Source
- Under Section 162 of the State Finance Law, the use of a preferred source vendor takes priority over compliance with SED’s MWBE policy. This section places the preferred source status on any special employment program serving developmentally disabled individuals, products and services produced by the correctional industries, and any qualified non-profit agency for the blind.
Deferred Compliance
- If you can’t identify participating MWBE firms at the time of your application submission, your grant may be accepted through this method. The MWBE grant vendor will then give you thirty days from the date of notice of grant award to submit the necessary documents for any of the above methods of compliance.
- You’ll also need to give satisfactory responses to any follow-up questions from SED. Failure to follow these instructions may lead to loss of funding.
Good Faith Efforts to Help You Fulfill Your MWBE Grant Requirements
- You must make a good faith effort to petition NYS-certified MWBE firms as subcontractors or vendors to provide services in your grant. Good faith efforts include identifying logical areas of the grant project that can subcontract to MWBE firms, setting up meetings or announcements to make MWBEs aware of supplier and subcontracting opportunities, and more.

To comply with MWBE goals, you must make, document, and submit evidence of your good faith efforts. Acceptable good faith effort documentation can come in form M/WBE 105, copies of your procurement policy and its impact on M/WBE hiring, Contractor’s Good Faith Efforts Certification, and copies of any relevant RFP with a memo explaining the lack of MWBE applicants. You can grant application can get rejected for lack of this documentation.