OSHA Tip Tuesday- $7M in Federal Grant Money Available for Safety Training

The Susan Harwood safety and health training grant has been replenished with $7M in new funding. OSHA is now accepting applications for grant money from nonprofits, employer associations, labor unions, joint labor/management associations and higher education institutes.

There are two separate types of grants available; Targeted Topic Training and Capacity Building. Applications for Capacity Building grants must be received by OSHA by Thursday June 26, 2014 and Targeted Topic Training grant applications are due by Monday, June 30, 2014. No extensions will be granted by OSHA.  In order to apply organizations must register first with the System for Award Management (SAM).  Beware of any scams out there: there is no fee to register with SAM. Then, grant applications should be submitted through grants.gov.

Targeted Topic Training grants will be granted to those who are training to specific occupational safety and health topics that will be specified by OSHA.   Targeted Topics are chosen based on a review of the latest occupational health and safety injury statistics, new regulations, new national emphasis programs and regional needs. The Capacity Building grants will be awarded on a basis of increasing the capacity of an organization to provide safety and health training to target audiences. This supports the goal of the Susan Harwood Training Grant program which is to increase the accessibility and availability of in-person hands-on training  and training materials for small businesses, high-risk industries, and workers who are considered to be under-served or have limited English speaking abilities.

In 2013 $11.4M was awarded through the Susan Harwood Safety and Health Training Grant. This enabled the training of 96,465 workers. Over the past 5 years 418,771 workers have been trained in safety and health through this training grant.

Past grant recipients have included organizations such as the Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA).   AIWA trained nearly 300 Asian immigrant women with limited English-speaking skills and low literacy to identify workplace hazards and practice injury prevention and mitigation techniques.  These women largely worked in the dry-cleaning, electronic assembly, packaging, food service and home health care industries.

However you don’t have to be awarded a training grant to access training materials that have been produced under the grant. The training materials that have been developed by previous grant recipients can be found here.