Community Description

The Grants Administration Community addresses a wide range of operational issues of concern to funders of health research and training. The group curates resources, offers webinars, and plans roundtable discussions on grants administration topics that are held at HRA Members Meetings. Past topics have included:

• Evaluation and scoring
• Peer review (including bias)
• Grants management and other software platforms
• Managing grants to international organizations
• Pre-award and post-award processes

Plans for 2025 are:

Maintenance of the HRA Grants Administration Handbook

In alignment with HRA’s Strategic Plan, the main priority for the Grants Administration Community has been to spearhead the creation of a grantmaking handbook specifically targeted for use by HRA members—health research funders. Along with leveraging the resources already on HRA’s website and listserv, the Grants Administration Community relies on knowledge, content, and feedback from member organizations through surveys, webinars, and breakout sessions at HRA Members Meetings. The handbook is a dynamic, living resource on the HRA website for members of all career levels to utilize, and is updated periodically to reflect current best practices and information. The HRA Grants Administration Handbook can be found here.  Your feedback and ongoing additions are most welcome!!!

Monthly Open Mic Webinars

The Grants Administration Community will continue to host discussions around all things grants administration, such as funder-institution relations, alumni-engagement and post-award follow-up, partnerships, outreach, the application and review process, and streamlining administrative requirements, directed by member input. The Grants Admin Community holds monthly webinars in an open mic-style format—unless there is a topic that lends itself to an invited expert speaker(s)—around two pre-planned topics of member interest based on common listserv questions and per member request to spark candid discussion. These informal webinars are not limited to the scheduled topics, and will unfold as the conversation dictates, offering common problems and potential (ideally evidence-based) solutions. Please see and add to the running list of topics here.

Member Surveys and Documents

In order to ensure the HRA member resources and Grants Administration Handbook are up-to-date, the Grants Administration Community will periodically create and send around surveys to the HRA membership—such as the Grants Management Software survey that was completed in 2024—and requests for common documents and policies to aggregate and make available to the membership.