 What's happening? It's Shane here and in today's video we are going to be talking about free government grants for individuals and small businesses in 2021. So I did a few videos talking about my experiences applying to grants as somebody who worked for a non-profit organization. This was back in 2019 and both of those videos blew up and got hundreds of thousands of views. So many people reached out to me saying they were super thankful for the resources that I sent them. I even got requests for personal consulting and personal coaching and I of course turned all of those requests down because honestly I'm just way too busy doing my YouTube stuff and as well as my other business stuff but I thought it was time again to make another super helpful video like that to help people that are maybe even in need right now especially with everything that's been happening in the world and in this video I am going to talk about grants for individuals and small businesses that are just kind of like general grants but I'm also going to be talking about grants that are related to what's happening in the world right now which I'm not going to say it but C-O-V-I-D I think you know what I'm talking about and the reason I don't say it is because I don't want this video to get demonetized and I'm really hoping this video helps even more people out and we are going to get right into that right after you gently tap the like button. Let's aim for 4,000 likes on this video I think we could probably do that and also hit that subscribe button I think only about 18 to 19 percent of people are subscribed to the channel and out of those 18 to 19 percent only about 8 percent turn on notifications so I think we could do better than that if you're lurking on the channel come on hit the subscribe button do me a favor you know that I work super hard on these videos and let's jump right into it all right so first one I'm going to mention this is one that I have mentioned before but basically it's the SBDC office so I think this is probably the best resource for starting off if you basically want to start your own business right and it's the first business you've ever started and really no matter how much business experience you have whether you are a veteran or you have never started a business you haven't even thought about starting a business this place is going to help you out tremendously it's such an amazing resource and I can't believe that more people don't know about it so if you go on the website and then put in your zip code they can help you find local grants but they also offer their own grants as well so for instance the SBNA is the small business network of america's grant last year for instance 10 different businesses got about $50,000 in order to develop their small business specifically small business right and that is just one example these guys are super helpful if they can't help you directly themselves they will refer you to somebody else who can and this office has probably helped tens if not hundreds of thousands of businesses get off the ground super super amazing resource the next one is the targeted economic injury disaster loan advanced grant wow that's a mouthful this is basically the EIDL it's the economic injury disaster loan and this is offered by the SBA small business administration and essentially you could get a $10,000 immediate loan and it's essentially most of the time going to just be forgiven right so even though it's called a loan it's pretty much just going to be a grant so it has to be spent on certain business obligations like financial obligations lease payments mortgage payments maintaining payroll paid leave sick leave increase costs due to the situation in the world etc the next one I want to talk about is state-based cov id relief grants so a lot of people thought that these state-based programs ran out of money and they were done after 2019 or 2020 but many of them are actually still operational and in some cases these grants are only offered in certain cities or certain counties and you have to live there right so they're probably not going to be as much but at the same time there's also not as much competition now the way you find these is you would either want to check with your local government officials or just search online and you basically want to type in your state or your city and then the word cov id relief grants and there should be a lot of resources that pop up there this is going to be a lot easier for kind of like a normal person to apply for a lot of the international and national grants you really have to know what you're doing when it comes to grant proposals but a lot of these really small ones it's not nearly as difficult for you to apply to them so I always recommend starting off with the small ones first another one that's going to be a lot easier for you to apply to is going to be corporate grants and this is another one where you know at the beginning of everything that happened there were a lot of corporations that did this some of them are still offering it some of them aren't and the best way to find out is to type in corporate word cov id relief grants onto google and a lot of different resources are going to pop up with this one especially time is going to be of the essence you have to apply to these really quickly sometimes it'll only you know have a window of maybe a week or a month where you can apply so one example of this would be list or the local initiative support corporation and that's going to be on list org and it says right on the main page 12,000 small businesses 215 million in grants during the pandemic okay accidentally said the word there whoops I'll bleep that out one resource that is surprisingly helpful is a website called grants dot gov and this is going to give you access to a bunch of different federal grants and the reason it's so helpful is because it's essentially a search engine where you can kind of like type in different keywords that have to do with your business and you will be able to look up grants that are specifically tailored to your type of business your industry and your niche now there are also programs that are very specific to research based entrepreneurship and the reason there's so many grants for this type of entrepreneurship is a lot of the time there's so much overhead cost and you have to take like sometimes five 1015 years before you can even get a product to market and make up your costs so one such program is SBIR or the small business innovation research program and they do grants $25,000 and up sometimes even in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and in many cases they will actually do multiple grants so they will continue to support you as long as you're showing that you're actually doing the research and you are you know finding some things that are actually going to help people out another one is STTR very similar to SBIR it's the small business technology transfer program essentially does the same thing as the SBIR but it's a little more tailored towards more like scientific research whereas SBIRs can be like technological as well now another really great resource that a lot of people overlook is instead of going for a grant or a loan sometimes it's best to actually try to get a government contract because with the same amount of work that it might take for you to get a 10 or a $25,000 grant you might be able to get a $500,000 government contract about one third of our economy is literally just the government buying stuff right so there are tons and tons of government contracts out there you just have to know how to get them a really good resource for this is aptac-us.org and if you think your small business is not going to be able to find any work with the government i can almost guarantee you that you're wrong they offer the weirdest weirdest government contracts there's a government contract to study how to create solar powered beer for instance what the hell that is like ridiculously niche right so if you can get a government contract to create solar powered beer then you can definitely find a government contract for like a normal business like consulting or social media management or something like that so yeah these in my opinion are some of the best possible resources that you can find in this particular time do make sure that you stay up to date on this stuff because you know i could post this video usually takes me like a week to edit or something like that i could post this video next week and by the time it hits you you know some of these might not even be available anymore so you definitely have to stay up to date on this stuff but with that being said really hope it helped you out let me know if you have any questions down in the comments below uh check out my other videos right here i made them just for you go ahead gently tap the like button hit that subscribe button ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts comments criticisms etc that you have on the video and i will see you next time