How grant discovery works.

VC Michelle looked for a specific federal grant — the U.S. Department of Education “Strengthening Institutions Program” (SIP), part of the Title III/V Hispanic-Serving-Institutions family she had seen on the ed.gov eligibility-designations page — and it was not in the tool. She was right to flag it: SDCCD is eligible and it is an active competition (closes June 23, 2026).

That gap surfaced a real problem in how the tool was built, and fixing it properly meant tracing the root cause all the way through the data pipeline.

Two issues, both now resolved.

• Snapshot-only storage. The tool kept only a live snapshot of currently-open opportunities. The moment a grant window closed, the record disappeared — even for programs that recur every year. A grant could be real, eligible, and active one week, then invisible the next.
• Wrong federal query filter. The federal feed queried Grants.gov with a filter that missed the entire higher-education eligibility family — SIP, HSI, TRIO, GEAR UP, and more never came through at all. The result was a real, eligible, open grant that looked like it did not exist.

• Ran a research investigation that live-tested the federal Grants.gov, USAspending, and Federal Register APIs to locate exactly what was breaking.
• Corrected the federal query so the whole eligible program family now comes in.
• Added a persistent program catalog so a program stays searchable year-round — even between funding cycles — with its history and next expected window, instead of disappearing when a competition closes.
• Changed the ingest pipeline to retain closed and archived opportunities, not discard them, so the recurrence story is preserved.
• Added government API keys (SAM.gov) and a Federal Register feed that surfaces the HSI/Title III “eligibility designation” notice — the exact page Michelle was looking at on ed.gov.
• Expanded California coverage: approximately 1,750 previously-dropped closed California state grants are retained and searchable again.

• The Strengthening Institutions Program (SIP) FY 2026 is now present — flagged eligible, AI-scored 82/100 for SDCCD fit, with a plain-English summary and its June 23 deadline.
• Searching “HSI”, “eligibility designation”, “TRIO”, or “GEAR UP” now returns the program even when no competition is currently open, with a status badge — Open now, Between cycles, or Designation gate.
• New grants are scored automatically every night, so the dashboard ranks them for you — no manual monitoring required.

Every grant and program in the tool is a real record pulled from official government APIs — Grants.gov, USAspending.gov, the Federal Register, and the California Grants Portal — each with a traceable source link. The system has database-level and code-level guards that make it structurally impossible to store an unconfirmed, simulated, or placeholder grant. If it is in the tool, it is real and sourced.