EPA Is Awarding Up to $250,000 for Environmental Education Projects. The Window Closes March 3.

In a federal funding environment where program cancellations have become routine news, the EPA Environmental Education Grant Program stands out for what it is not: it has not been canceled, not been paused, and not had its guidelines quietly rewritten to exclude most of its traditional applicants. The competition is open, the amounts are meaningful, and the deadline is one week away.

The EPA announced up to $3.2 million in awards under the Environmental Education Grant Program for FY 2026, with grants ranging from $200,000 to $250,000 each. The agency expects to fund up to 16 organizations nationwide. Applications close March 3, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. ET through Grants.gov. The Funding Opportunity Number is EPA-EE-25-01.

What the Program Has Funded Since 1991

The Environmental Education Grant Program draws its authority from Section 10 of the National Environmental Education Act. It has operated continuously since 1991 — through administrations of both parties — because its mandate is politically durable: locally grounded projects that help people understand environmental challenges in their own communities and take practical steps to address them.

"Practical steps" is carrying real weight in that mandate. EPA is not funding awareness campaigns or publications that end up in a drawer. Funded projects "design, demonstrate, and/or disseminate environmental education practices, methods, or techniques" with measurable community engagement. The program has a particular emphasis on projects focused on water protection, public health, and natural resource stewardship at the local level.

Previous award cycles have funded watershed monitoring programs run in partnership with middle school students, community training on lead exposure reduction in older housing, tribal environmental education programs that integrate traditional ecological knowledge with contemporary conservation science, and urban greening projects that connect residents to local biodiversity. The common thread is that participants leave knowing something actionable and equipped to do something with it.

Who Is Eligible

The eligible applicant pool is intentionally broad. Local education agencies, colleges and universities, state environmental agencies, nonprofit organizations, and federally recognized tribal governments and tribal colleges have all received EE grants. For-profit organizations are not eligible.

The program does not require applicants to be established environmental organizations. A community health nonprofit whose work touches environmental health determinants, a tribal college teaching place-based ecological education, or a regional land trust that wants to develop environmental literacy programming for adjacent communities — all of these fit within the program's scope.

Award amounts between $200,000 and $250,000 are well-calibrated for community-scale projects: hiring a program coordinator, developing curriculum materials, training community educators, and building the local partnerships that allow environmental education to persist after a grant period ends. This is not a program that requires an institutional grants infrastructure to manage — it is accessible to smaller organizations with limited development staff if their project concept is solid and their community connections are genuine.

How to Build a Competitive Application

EPA's Environmental Education and Stewardship Division ran an informational webinar on February 5, 2026, walking prospective applicants through the current NOFO requirements and common application weaknesses. The recording and materials are available through the Environmental Education Grant Program page at epa.gov/education/grants. For any organization that is considering applying, reviewing that webinar material is the most efficient investment of time before the March 3 deadline.

Review criteria reward clarity about outcomes. The central questions reviewers are asking: What will participants know or do differently after your project? Who specifically are you reaching, and why are they the right audience for this work? How does your project address a concrete local environmental challenge — not environmental awareness in the abstract, but a specific issue that your community is facing and that your project is designed to address?

The project narrative should make the theory of change legible without jargon. A proposal that describes a twelve-week water quality curriculum for a community downstream of an agricultural district, explains how it connects to a specific watershed protection effort, names the partner organizations involved, and specifies how it will measure participant knowledge and behavior change — that is the shape of a competitive application.

Budget accuracy matters more than budget maximization. Grants are capped between $200,000 and $250,000, and that range is not an open invitation to reach for the ceiling. Reviewers notice when project narratives describe activities that clearly cost $90,000 but budgets are written to approach $250,000. Work from the activities backward to what they genuinely require.

Letters of support from partner organizations strengthen an application when they are specific and reflect actual working relationships. A form letter from an organization that has never collaborated with your team is neutral at best. A brief, specific letter from a partner that describes what they are actually contributing to the project — meeting space, participant recruitment, technical review, co-facilitation — adds something reviewers can evaluate.

The Funding Moment for Environmental Education

The program's consistent operation across three decades is worth noting. Challenge America and Cultural and Community Resilience programs — comparable in spirit to the EE Grant Program at other agencies — have been canceled or not reoffered for FY 2026 at the National Endowment for the Arts and other funders. The EPA Environmental Education program is running.

$3.2 million is a modest federal appropriation by any measure. But for the organizations this program is designed to serve, grants in the $200,000 to $250,000 range often represent the difference between a sustained, staffed environmental education program and one that depends entirely on volunteer capacity and cannot scale.

The program also carries the useful attribute of institutional legitimacy. An EPA award on an organization's grant history opens doors with state agencies, community foundations, and corporate funders that might otherwise overlook smaller environmental education nonprofits. For organizations at an early stage of building their federal track record, this is a meaningful consideration.

Applications go through Grants.gov. For questions before submitting, the program team is at EEGrants@epa.gov. The deadline is March 3 — one week from today.

For environmental educators searching beyond this cycle, Granted indexes EPA grant programs alongside state environmental agencies and private foundations, making it easier to build a multi-year funding pipeline that does not depend on any single federal opportunity.