Nonprofit Security Grant Access

Federal nonprofit security grant funding, which covers cameras, access control, and lighting upgrades, had an unclear eligibility path for association headquarters buildings. The program's guidance was written with 501(c)(3) charities in mind, and it never explicitly said whether a headquarters building belonging to a 501(c)(6) trade association qualified. In practice, several members reported being turned away by regional program administrators who assumed the funding was charity-only, even though nothing in the underlying statute limited it that way. NANA's position, pressed since Senior Policy Manager Farah Qureshi-Lindgren picked up the file after joining the staff in 2022, was that the eligibility question needed to be answered in writing, not left to inconsistent field-level judgment calls.

This issue is now resolved: eligibility for association headquarters buildings was confirmed in October 2024. Any 501(c)(6) or 501(c)(3) association headquarters can now apply for the same grant program available to other nonprofit facilities, regardless of which regional office administers the local application.

The clarification matters most for smaller member organizations that own or lease their own office space rather than sharing space inside a larger institution, since those are the buildings most likely to lack existing camera or access-control infrastructure and least likely to have a security-upgrade budget line of their own. A four-person association staff working out of a converted rowhouse with a public-facing lobby or meeting space is a typical example of the building this program was meant to help, and is exactly the kind of applicant who had been discouraged from trying before the clarification.

With eligibility confirmed, NANA is not asking for further rulemaking on this issue. The policy team is keeping the file open for monitoring, in case program administrators revisit the guidance in a future funding cycle, and is tracking how many member organizations actually apply over the coming year to build a rough sense of uptake. Members who apply are asked to report their experience back to NANA's policy team, since real application outcomes are what would let NANA flag any regional inconsistency that reopens this question.