BJA Has $2.1M for Wandering Prevention and 14 Awards to Give. It's Also One of the Few DOJ Programs Where a Nonprofit Can Be the Prime Applicant.

Scan the Bureau of Justice Assistance's FY 2026 slate and the eligibility sections start to blur together: state governments, county governments, city or township governments, tribal governments that perform law enforcement functions. Nonprofits appear as subrecipients, if at all.

The Kevin and Avonte Program is the exception, and it is worth reading closely for that reason alone. Its eligibility list runs eleven entity types deep and includes 501(c)(3) nonprofits, nonprofits without 501(c)(3) status, private institutions of higher education, independent school districts, and health care agencies — explicitly including Federally Qualified Health Centers, nonprofit health clinics, and behavioral health providers. A community autism organization or a rural FQHC can hold this award directly, with a sheriff's office as its subrecipient rather than the reverse.

The Numbers

The solicitation is O-BJA-2026-172697, released August 17, 2026 under Assistance Listing 16.015, with statutory authority at Pub. L. No. 103-322, Sec. 240001, codified at 34 U.S.C. 12621.

• Expected total funding: up to $2,105,869
• Anticipated number of awards: 14
• Anticipated award amount: up to $150,000
• Performance period: 36 months beginning October 1, 2026
• Cost sharing: none required
• Application limit: one per applicant

Deadlines follow DOJ's two-portal structure: the SF-424 in Grants.gov by 11:59 p.m. Eastern on October 6, 2026, then the full application in JustGrants by 8:59 p.m. Eastern on October 13, 2026. Missing the first forfeits the second — JustGrants will not accept a package for an opportunity where no SF-424 landed.

One date has already passed. The NOFO instructs applicants to begin SAM.gov registration or renewal by September 5 and no later than September 21, 2026. That window closed four days ago. If your Unique Entity ID is current, you are fine. If it lapsed, treat entity registration as the critical path and everything else as secondary, because a validated SF-424 cannot be submitted without it and renewals routinely take one to two weeks.

What the Program Funds, and Why It Exists

Kevin and Avonte's Law, enacted in 2018, is named for two children with autism who drowned after wandering from safe environments: Kevin Curtis Wills, nine years old, in Iowa's Raccoon River in 2008, and Avonte Oquendo, fourteen, in New York City's East River in 2014. The program funds two distinct things:

1. Locative technology — tracking systems deployed through law enforcement, other public safety agencies, and health care agencies to locate missing individuals with dementia or developmental disabilities.
2. Prevention and response programs — operated by those agencies and by partnering nonprofits to prevent wandering, increase safety, and facilitate rescues.

Technical assistance runs through the Autism Society of America in collaboration with the International Association of Chiefs of Police and The Arc's National Center, under the "Building Bridges" initiative. Applicants should expect to plug into that structure rather than build training from scratch — and should say so in the narrative, because it reads as capability rather than dependency.

The Six-Month Rescue-Rate Objective Is a Measurement Trap

The NOFO's Goal 1 has four objectives. Three are conventional. The second is not:

"Implement tracking technology that enables the safe recovery of individuals who wander, with a documented increase in successful rescue rates within six months of technology deployment."

Parse that. A documented increase in a rate, within six months of deployment. An increase over what? The NOFO does not supply a baseline, which means you have to. And most jurisdictions do not currently track wandering incidents as a distinct category — they show up in computer-aided dispatch as missing persons, welfare checks, or found-person calls, with the underlying condition recorded in narrative text if at all.

So the objective quietly imposes a baseline-construction task before deployment. Three workable approaches, in descending order of strength:

• Retrospective CAD query. Pull 24 to 36 months of missing-person and welfare-check calls, filter for the target population, and establish incident count, mean time-to-location, and outcome distribution. This is the strongest baseline and the most work.
• Partner-held data. Memory-care facilities, school districts, and Alzheimer's Association chapters often have incident logs that predate any law enforcement report. A subrecipient relationship gets you legitimate access.
• Enrollment-cohort design. If no historical baseline exists, propose measuring outcomes among enrolled individuals against non-enrolled incidents in the same period. Weaker causally, defensible practically, and honest.

The Description of the Need section reinforces this. It asks for "specific data that demonstrate the extent of wandering incidents in your community (e.g., number of reported incidents, population affected, injuries or fatalities related to wandering)." An application that asserts wandering is a problem without local numbers is competing against applications that counted.

Scoring Tells You Where to Spend Pages

The narrative is weighted: Description of the Need 5%, Project Goals and Objectives 15%, Project Design and Implementation 35%, Capabilities and Competencies 30%, Budget 15%.

Thirty percent on capabilities is high — higher than most BJA competitive programs, and ten points above what the companion judicial-security solicitation assigns. The NOFO spells out why: it asks applicants to "show how your organization and team can meet the needs of individuals with dementia or developmental disabilities who are at risk of wandering."

That is a substantive test, and it is where the unusually wide eligibility list becomes strategically useful. A police department applying alone has strong operational capability and weak clinical capability. An autism services nonprofit has the inverse. The 30% weighting favors whichever entity can credibly claim both — which in practice means the pairing matters more than which partner signs as prime. Pick the prime by whose capabilities narrative is stronger, not by who has more staff.

The fourth objective — public education campaigns teaching families, caregivers, teachers, and communities about wandering risk — is the cheapest scoring opportunity in the NOFO and the one most often left out of technology-centric applications. Locative devices are the visible deliverable; caregiver education is what reduces incidence.

The Certification That Denies Applications Outright

State and local government applicants must submit a Certification by the Chief Executive Officer (or senior official) of the Applicant Government, using only the template in the NOFO's Appendix. The NOFO is blunt about the consequence: this "is a basic minimum requirement of this funding opportunity, such that applications from applicants required to submit it and fail to do so, will be denied."

Tribal government entities and educational organizations are exempt. Nonprofits are not listed as required to submit it either — the requirement is written against "an applicant that is a state or local government entity." That asymmetry is a real factor in deciding who applies as prime: a nonprofit prime with a municipal subrecipient avoids a document that has killed applications on technicalities.

State and local government recipients should also anticipate an award condition addressing compliance with 8 U.S.C. § 1373, the immigration-status information-sharing provision. The NOFO's agency funding priorities include "directly supporting law enforcement operations (including immigration law enforcement operations)" and, at item (f), state and local enforcement coordinated with federal efforts as shown by § 1373 compliance, correctional-facility access for federal agents, and honoring DHS release-notification requests. The out-of-scope clause bars any activity that impedes enforcement of federal immigration law.

Applicants seeking priority consideration must complete the Agency Funding Priorities Inventory in JustGrants and state in the narrative which priorities the project advances. Applicants who do not qualify should simply not claim them — BJA notes priority consideration is one of many factors and does not guarantee funding, and a strained claim reads worse than no claim. This is the same conditions architecture now standard across BJA's FY 2026 slate, including the ANGEL program and the FY 2026 Coordinated Tribal Assistance Solicitation.

Do the Award Math Before Specifying Hardware

$150,000 across 36 months is about $4,170 per month. That funds a part-time coordinator and a modest device inventory — not both a full-time position and a county-wide deployment.

The trap is device economics. Locative technology carries per-unit hardware cost plus recurring cellular or monitoring subscription, and the subscription runs for the full 36 months. A budget that buys 200 units in year one and discovers the monitoring contract consumes years two and three has funded a pilot that dies at month thirteen. Price the recurring line first, subtract it from the ceiling, and let what remains determine unit count. Fourteen awards against a national need means reviewers are looking for a program that survives the award period, not the largest device order.

A useful reference point: prior-year rounds of this program ran to roughly 16 awards at the same $150,000 ceiling, so FY 2026 is marginally tighter at 14. It remains one of the smallest competitive pots BJA runs — and one of the few where a community nonprofit, a health center, or a school district competes on equal footing with a sheriff's office. Eleven days out from the Grants.gov deadline, the sorting question is whether your organization can produce a local incident baseline and a signed partner structure in that window. Finding the programs where your organization is actually the strongest applicant, rather than a plausible one, is what Granted does.