Fiscal Year 2025 NOAA Delaware Bay B-WET Funding Program | NOAA NMFS HCPO 2025 29770

Opportunity Information: Apply for NOAA NMFS HCPO 2025 29770

The Fiscal Year 2025 NOAA Delaware Bay B-WET Funding Program is a competitive NOAA grant opportunity designed to strengthen environmental education for K-12 audiences across the Delaware Bay watershed region, specifically in Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. The program is part of NOAA's Bay Watershed Education and Training (B-WET) initiative and is focused on helping schools and local partners create high-quality, place-based learning that connects students to real environmental issues in their own communities. The funding is intended to support projects that are locally relevant, tied to watershed and coastal systems, and built to improve environmental literacy and stewardship over time.

A central feature of this opportunity is its emphasis on Meaningful Watershed Educational Experiences (MWEEs). An MWEE is a learner-centered approach where students investigate a local environmental issue and move from learning to informed action. Projects are expected to include multiple MWEE components that blend classroom learning with outdoor field experiences. These components typically include defining an environmental issue that matters locally, conducting hands-on fieldwork outdoors, analyzing and synthesizing what was learned to draw conclusions, and then completing an environmental action project that allows students to apply their learning in a practical way. The overall goal is to help students understand the Delaware Bay and its connected watersheds, including rivers, smaller streams, upland areas, and the natural habitats that support both wildlife and human communities.

The program description highlights that MWEE-based projects should be interdisciplinary, meaning they can draw on multiple subject areas to help students understand how natural systems and human communities influence each other. By grounding learning in local places and real-world problems, the program aims to build stronger connections between students and their surrounding environment while developing the knowledge and decision-making skills needed for stewardship. In practice, this can involve partnerships between school systems and organizations such as nonprofits, universities, or local agencies that bring technical expertise, field sites, or educator training capacity into the project.

The stated priority for this particular funding announcement is "Supporting systemic and sustainable MWEEs." That means NOAA is looking for proposals that go beyond one-off field trips or short-term activities and instead build lasting environmental literacy programming. Projects that strengthen a school district's ability to deliver MWEEs year after year, develop strong implementation models, embed MWEEs into curricula, and build educator capacity through rigorous teacher training and professional development align well with this priority. The opportunity also notes that projects should advance regional fisheries initiatives, align with state and local education and environmental priorities, and support the broader goals of the NOAA Education Strategic Plan.

This opportunity is offered as a discretionary award using a cooperative agreement funding instrument, which generally implies that NOAA expects to have some level of programmatic involvement during the project period compared with a standard grant. The Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) number associated with the opportunity is 11.008, and the funding activity categories are education and environment.

Eligibility is broad but limited to nonprofit and public-serving entities. Eligible applicants include K-12 public and independent schools and school systems, institutions of higher education, community-based and nonprofit organizations, state or local government agencies, interstate agencies, and Indian tribal governments. Individuals are not eligible to apply, and neither are for-profit organizations, foreign organizations, or foreign public entities as direct applicants. However, those ineligible entities may participate as project partners under an eligible lead applicant, and federal agencies also cannot receive funds under this announcement but may serve as partners. The announcement points applicants to the federal regulations on subrecipient and partner relationships (2 CFR 200.331) for additional guidance on how those roles should be structured and managed.

Key logistical details included in the posting are the opportunity number (NOAA NMFS HCPO 2025 29770), the agency (U.S. Department of Commerce, NOAA), the original closing date (April 18, 2025), and an award ceiling of $225,000 per award. The opportunity was created on January 22, 2025.

• The DOC NOAA - ERA Production in the education, environment sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Fiscal Year 2025 NOAA Delaware Bay B-WET Funding Program" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 11.008.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2025-01-22.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2025-04-18. (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 $225,000.00 in funding.
• Eligible applicants include: Others.

Apply for NOAA NMFS HCPO 2025 29770

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