This website provides you with plenty of information about how you can receive government grants for yourself or your organization. But here, we’re going to take a quick look at how you can provide for others and benefit yourself. You can donate cash, services, or useful items to charities that benefit communities, men, women, children, or animals.

Picture the typical college or university student. You probably envisioned a teenage or twenty-ish kid who’s living it up at college, Animal House-style. Well, it may be time to rethink that. The average age of the college students has been rising, mostly due to adults returning to school. What are called “non-traditional” or “mature” students are becoming more the norm now.

The latest, greatest idea for making a college education affordable sounds simple enough — students can attend school for free.

But there’s a catch.

In return for free tuition, students have to agree to pay a fixed percentage of their future income for a specified number of years to a special fund that would pay other students’ college bills.

A version of the pay-it-forward tuition plan was introduced recently in the Michigan Legislature and is awaiting action. More than 20 states are looking at some version of the plan, although most are simply looking at studying it, while the Michigan bill would set up a pilot program.

Student loan consolidation is the process of taking multiple outstanding loans and reorganizing them into a single loan, sometimes with a longer repayment period and therefore a lower monthly payment. If you’re in serious debt and ineligible for student loan forgiveness, consolidation could offer the solution you need. Here’s what you need to know.

Grants are often designated for specific groups of people, and one group that receives many different types of funding are the older members of our society. One of the most basic needs for a senior is having a safe, secure energy-efficient home. Government grants for real estate (also called government grants for properties in some places).

Youth in Canada will now have more opportunity thanks to a new private sector alliance between a group of independent Canadian business owners and Pomeroy Equitable Solutions LLC (PES), a US-based company that created the youth funding movement Swipe4TheKids.

Swipe4TheKids is a sustainable funding source for youth enrichment programs. Made possible by partnerships between businesses, their customers, and merchant services partner Eclypse Solutions, Swipe4TheKids allows vital programs to flourish and provides long-term benefits.

Do you have a Registered Education Savings Plan (RESP) for your child? Remember the age 15 deadline if you have not yet opened an RESP for your child. If your child was born in 1999, this is the year to open an RESP and deposit $2,000 before Dec. 31. You will be rewarded with a $500 matching federal government grant for 2014.

For a newly opened RESP with a 15-year-old beneficiary, you must deposit at least $2,000 in 2014 to qualify for grants in 2015 and 2016. By making optimum catch-up RESP deposits of $5,000 in each of the following two years, you can earn up to $2,000 of federal grants.

If you do nothing in 2014, then in 2015, when your child turns 16, you’d be too late for a government grant for a first-time RESP deposit.

This article is about avoiding scholarship scams, but what makes it special is that it was researched and compiled by high school students, who are themselves in the target demographic for scholarship scamsters. It originally appeared in The Mash, a weekly publication distributed to Chicagoland high schools.

Everyone wants to get the really big grants. However, if you focus exclusively on these, you may miss out on funding your project. A different approach is to seek several smaller grants, which are more commonly found and may have less competition. An effective way to do this is to divide your project into parts that function independently.

Students who admit to their habit of driving buzzed or drunk — and are willing to write about it — could receive a $1,000 college scholarship this spring.

Christian Schwaner, a private defense attorney in Colorado Springs, launched the First Step Scholarship this fall in an effort to decrease the number of high school students driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol. The unique scholarship has stirred a mixed response from the community, with some enthused about the new approach and others urging caution.

Schwaner, who is also the father of a high school senior, has represented dozens of young drivers who made the mistake of driving after drinking, he said. The scholarship will help students admit their mistakes by researching the dangers of driving under the influence.

YouthBuild grants totaling $76M available to help at-risk youth
complete education, develop job and leadership skills. The program helps young people who left school early to complete high school or state equivalency degree programs, and learn critical job skills in demand in the construction, health care, information technology and other industries.

It’s unquestionably a huge disappointment to work hard on your grant proposal, only to have it not be chosen. At this point you can either become discouraged and give up, or you can use the rejection as a learning experience. Most proposals are rejected. Given the large numbers of proposals that are submitted, that is a reality of the process. However, you can try to pinpoint the reason in several ways:

Some parents make the decision that they want to homeschool their kids. If you decide to do so, you’ll want to check into how this will affect your child’s college scholarship opportunities. We’re going to look at some questions you need to ask and some research you should do. Then in the next article we’ll take a look at 10 sample scholarships that homeschoolers are eligible for.

Here’s one more way Charleston’s mayor says his community is fighting hate with love after nine people were gunned down in a church massacre: A $3 million scholarship fund.

The Reverend Pinckney Scholarship Fund, created by anonymous donors and announced Thursday, will help the victims’ families and others affiliated with Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, officials said.

“What a tremendous opportunity to show the world once more and again that goodness of heart overtakes evil, and that we continuously show the world how we respond to a tragedy,” said the Rev. Dr. Norvel Goff, presiding elder at the church.

Golden Key encourages its members to dream big, and never, ever stop. The Society not only offers education-based scholarships to make those dreams a reality, but awards for service and leadership achievements, as well. Golden Key grants give advisors the opportunity to develop their skills professionally, while the fellowships offer graduate students a once-in-a-lifetime chance to further their knowledge through foundation-backed research. Some scholarships target specific fields of study, allowing members to study alongside those with similar interests. Others focus on countries or regions, affording members the luxury of studying abroad or participating in a faraway internship program.

I get a lot of questions about government grant proposals, and I’ve reviewed a fair number of them. I’ve seen some instances where people want to make a grand political statement as part of their government grant request or making the basis of their funding request kind of a pushback against some public policy that they don’t agree with.

Ahead of the election earlier this month, Trudeau fleshed out these plans, which centred on increasing Canada Student Grants (state-funded bursaries for tertiary study) by 50 per cent to C$3,000 (£1,500) a year. Announcing the policy at Wilfrid Laurier University, he said that graduates would start repayment once they are earning at least C$25,000 a year. According to Statistics Canada, on average undergraduate students paid C$5,959 in tuition fees in 2014-15, so the grant would cover roughly half of the fees.

Comedian and talk show host Stephen Colbert on Thursday announced he is giving back to schools in his home state of South Carolina — funding some 1,000 grants made by public school teachers on education crowdfunding site DonorsChoose.org. Colbert announced at a teacher’s panel in Greenville Thursday morning that he, along with organizations Share Fair Nation and ScanSource, are donating $800,000 to fund every one of the classroom projects listed by the site.