Coastal Habitat Restoration and Resilience Grants for Tribes and Underserved Communities, Under the BIL Round 3 | NOAA NMFS HCPO 2025 29689

Opportunity Information: Apply for NOAA NMFS HCPO 2025 29689

The Coastal Habitat Restoration and Resilience Grants for Tribes and Underserved Communities (BIL Round 3) is a NOAA funding opportunity designed to help tribes, tribal entities, and underserved communities take a stronger role in coastal habitat restoration work that also improves resilience to climate and disaster risks. Run through the Department of Commerce, NOAA (with administration by NOAA's Office of Habitat Conservation), the program focuses on making sure communities that are often under-resourced are not just beneficiaries of restoration, but active leaders and decision-makers in planning and implementing projects that affect their shorelines, waters, and local economies. The overall intent is to support practical, community-centered restoration that reduces vulnerability to hazards like hurricanes, coastal storms, flooding, and sea level rise, while also delivering ecological and economic benefits tied to healthy habitats.

NOAA expects up to $20 million total to be available under this round. A major feature of this opportunity is that up to $15 million is set aside specifically for direct awards and subawards to Indian tribes (as defined in 25 U.S.C. Section 5304(e)) and Native American organizations that formally represent Indian tribes through legal agreements, such as tribal commissions, consortia, conservation districts, and cooperatives. The remaining funds are available to the broader pool of eligible applicants, as long as the proposed work directly benefits tribes, tribal entities, and/or underserved communities and aligns with the program priorities. Awards will be made as cooperative agreements, meaning NOAA will typically have substantial involvement during the project period compared with a standard grant.

The program is authorized by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Public Law 117-58), and it explicitly does not impose a formal match requirement. Even without a match requirement, competitiveness is still driven by how closely a proposal fits the program's priorities, how credible and ready the work is, and how clearly benefits flow to the intended communities. NOAA signals that projects with higher certainty of completion within a 2 to 3 year window will be viewed more favorably, though it allows an overall period of performance of up to three years in most cases, and potentially up to five years if needed and approved.

Funding requests must fall within specific bounds. NOAA expects typical award sizes in the range of $250,000 to $1 million over three years, but applicants may request anywhere from $75,000 to $2 million total federal share for the full award period. Requests at the top end (approaching $2 million) are expected to include on-the-ground restoration actions, not just planning, capacity building, or engagement on their own. The closing date listed for this round is May 12, 2025, and the opportunity number is NOAA NMFS HCPO 2025 29689 (CFDA 11.463).

NOAA organizes the supported work into three main activity types, and applicants can propose one or combine multiple categories. The first category is capacity building, which can include participating in municipal or regional resilience planning, conducting project planning and feasibility studies, carrying out stakeholder engagement, developing future funding proposals, and delivering outreach and education. It can also cover hiring staff to strengthen an organization or community's ability to design and implement restoration, and to manage federal awards effectively, including reporting, tracking progress, and coordinating partners. The second category is meaningful engagement, which emphasizes practical ways to involve community members in the project through educational opportunities, facilitated discussions, and even paid experiences that help ensure local participation is real and sustained rather than symbolic. The third category is restoration project activities, including demonstration projects, which can span engineering and design, permitting, on-the-ground construction or habitat work, and monitoring before and after implementation to show outcomes and inform adaptive management.

Geographically, projects must take place in coastal, estuarine, marine, or Great Lakes areas. Great Lakes proposals must be within the Great Lakes basin and located in one of the eight U.S. Great Lakes states: New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, or Minnesota. Applications in U.S. territories are eligible for this opportunity, specifically American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. Applicants from the Freely Associated States (the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Palau, and the Federated States of Micronesia) are not eligible to apply as prime applicants under this opportunity.

A core thread throughout the competition is NOAA's expectation that proposals will demonstrate equity-centered design and clear community benefit. NOAA links this program to the Justice40 Initiative, which aims to ensure that 40 percent of the benefits of certain federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities that have been overburdened by pollution and underinvestment. In practice, applicants are expected to identify whether the project is located within tribal or underserved communities and/or explain how a meaningful portion of resilience benefits will flow back to those communities. NOAA also encourages applicants to incorporate diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) principles in project identification, design, and delivery, and to elevate local and Indigenous knowledge appropriately in planning, implementation, and evaluation.

Eligibility is intentionally broad, but with a strict requirement that the application be grounded in a tribe, tribal entity, and/or underserved community. Eligible applicants include federally recognized tribal governments and other tribal organizations, state and local governments, U.S. territories, special districts, schools and universities (public or private), nonprofits (both 501(c)(3) and non-501(c)(3)), and for-profit entities (including small businesses). However, any applicant that is not itself a tribe, tribal entity, or underserved community must credibly demonstrate a connection to and endorsement from the community or communities that will benefit. NOAA will review that status or connection during eligibility screening and again during merit review, and it will validate claims using publicly available demographic and economic data. For partner-led applications, NOAA places weight on the strength of the partnership and requires supporting documentation showing the applicant has been endorsed for the specific work proposed, typically through letters of support included with supplemental materials.

There are also a few clear participation boundaries. Federal agencies and federal employees cannot apply as prime recipients, though they may participate as unfunded collaborators. Foreign entities are not positioned as prime applicants either; instead, they can be included as partners (for example, as contractors, subrecipients, or informal collaborators) under a U.S.-based prime recipient. Overall, NOAA is looking for proposals that combine readiness and technical credibility with strong community leadership, clear restoration or resilience outcomes, and an approach that builds lasting capacity so tribes and underserved communities are better positioned to lead future coastal habitat restoration efforts.

• The DOC NOAA - ERA Production in the community development, environment sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Coastal Habitat Restoration and Resilience Grants for Tribes and Underserved Communities, Under the BIL Round 3" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 11.463.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2024-12-13.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2025-05-12. (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 $2,000,000.00 in funding.
• Eligible applicants include: State governments, County governments, City or township governments, Special district governments, Independent school districts, Public and State controlled institutions of higher education, Native American tribal governments (Federally recognized), Native American tribal organizations (other than Federally recognized tribal governments), Nonprofits having a 501 (c) (3) status with the IRS, other than institutions of higher education, Nonprofits that do not have a 501 (c) (3) status with the IRS, other than institutions of higher education, Private institutions of higher education, For-profit organizations other than small businesses, Small businesses.

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