Pennsylvania's Future Works Grant Has 20 Points You Cannot Write. They Are Awarded by a Different Agency.

Most competitive grant scorecards reward the applicant who writes the best answer. Pennsylvania's new Future Works Grant contains a block worth 20 percent of the total score where writing a better answer is impossible — by design.

The Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry released the Notice of Grant Availability on September 10, 2026, making approximately $2,000,000 in state Reemployment funds available. Four grants of up to $500,000 each will be competitively awarded, with L&I reserving the right to make additional awards or revise funding levels. Applications are due December 9, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. ET, submitted by email to the Bureau of Workforce Development Administration's grants services account with the subject line "NGA Application Future Works Grant – Program Year 2026."

The period of performance runs March 1, 2027 through February 28, 2029 — a clean 24 months.

The questions deadline is November 24, 2026 at 4:00 p.m. ET, and it is a hard wall: the NGA states that questions received after that date will not be answered. A bidders' conference was held October 6, with a recording posted to the L&I grants page.

The 20 points you cannot earn by writing

Here is the scoring breakdown, which totals 100:

Now read what the NGA says about that third row. Points for the DCED and Office of Transformation and Opportunity section "will be awarded by DCED and OTO based on economic development projects that DCED has actively supported, whether involving specific companies or targeted industries." And then, in one sentence: "Nothing is required by the applicant for this section."

That is twenty points — a full fifth of the scorecard — assessed by two sister agencies based on their own records of which companies and industries they have already been working with. You cannot narrate your way into it. You cannot submit a stronger letter. The only lever an applicant has is which businesses they name in the application.

This is the strategic core of the entire competition. If your project is built around businesses that the Department of Community & Economic Development has actively supported — a company DCED helped attract or expand, or an industry inside its targeted-sector work — you start twenty points ahead of an equally well-written application built around businesses DCED has never touched. With four awards available and a two-stage selection process, twenty points decides this.

The practical move before you write the narrative: get on the phone with your DCED regional office and the Office of Transformation and Opportunity and find out which businesses in your area are in their active portfolio. Then build your business engagement around the intersection of that list and your own.

Who can apply, and who cannot

Eligible applicants are Local Workforce Development Boards only. The fiscal agent must be an eligible LWDB, and if boards apply as a region, they must appoint a single lead LWDB to receive, manage, and disburse funds.

That is a narrow prime pool. But the partnership structure is where everyone else gets in, and it is mandatory. Applications must include at least one committed partner from each of six categories:

• Private sector employer(s)
• Organized labor entities
• Community college(s) and/or post-secondary institutions
• Secondary educational institutions
• Career and technical education entities
• Economic development agency(s)

Each required partner must be identified at the time of application, must have an active role, and must supply a unique letter of support. "Unique" is the operative word — six near-identical letters with the organization name swapped will read exactly as what it is.

If you are a community college, a CTE center, a building trades council, or an economic development agency in Pennsylvania, you are not an applicant here. You are a required ingredient, and the LWDBs in your region have about eight weeks to find you. Making yourself easy to find — with a named contact, a described role, and a letter you can turn around in days — is the entire play.

Only six industries qualify, and NAICS codes decide it

Only businesses operating in six industries may be considered:

Agriculture · Energy · Life Sciences · Manufacturing · Maritime/Shipbuilding · Robotics and Technology

L&I defines these by four-digit NAICS codes listed in Appendix H of the NGA. Applicants must self-report the industry based on the four-digit code assigned by the Unemployment Insurance agency of the business's state; where a business has no assigned code yet, the applicant proposes the most relevant one. L&I reserves the right to reject an application where the self-reported industry does not align with the business's registration.

Do not improvise this. Pull the business's actual UI-assigned code, confirm it appears in Appendix H, and keep the documentation. A mis-sorted NAICS code is both a scoring problem and a rejection risk, and it drives the selection mechanics described below.

The selection logic: highest score does not mean four awards

Pennsylvania built a two-stage process to force geographic and industry spread.

All applications passing initial eligibility review get scored in merit review. Then:

1. The highest-scoring application receives the first award.
2. The second award goes to the next highest scorer — unless that application falls in the same industry and the same geographic area as the top scorer. If it does, the committee moves down the list until it finds a different industry, even if the geography repeats.
3. This continues until four distinct selections are made.
4. If any of the top four scores are too low to be considered responsive, the remaining grants will not be awarded.

Only one award per industry within the same geographic area. Multiple awards may go to the same industry if each serves a different geographic area.

Translated: a strong manufacturing proposal from a region that already produced the top-scoring manufacturing proposal gets skipped regardless of its score. If you are in a dense manufacturing corridor, consider whether your genuinely best project is in a less-contested sector — Agriculture, Maritime/Shipbuilding, and Robotics and Technology are structurally thinner fields statewide. And note point 4: L&I would rather award two grants than four weak ones. There is no participation floor here.

Work that must already be done before you apply

Two of the Business Engagement activities carry an explicit note: "This must occur prior to application."

• Identify the new or expanding businesses that will benefit from individualized workforce services.
• Identify occupations within those businesses that offer family-sustaining wages and job quality and align with regional workforce priorities.

The Project Design criterion then demands the names of the businesses, and for each occupation the starting and average wage plus the job quality factors the company offers — insurance, paid leave, employee assistance, childcare accessibility, shift structure, flexibility.

You cannot assemble that from public data. It requires employers to disclose wage bands and benefits specifics to you, in writing, before December 9. If you have not started those conversations, that is the task that determines whether you can submit at all — not the narrative.

One more activity worth highlighting: applicants must analyze business hiring practices to identify unnecessary hiring barriers, with the NGA naming as an example "excluding individuals with criminal backgrounds when not job-related." That is a fair-chance hiring review embedded in a business-services grant, and it is a required component, not an optional one.

Two details that say something about 2026

First, the NGA discloses on its own second page that L&I's Bureau of Workforce Development Administration "drafted this Notice of Grant Availability using OpenAI ChatGPT for organizational and editing purposes." In the same document, the bidders' conference notice prohibits AI transcription and summarization tools in meetings with Commonwealth employees — if one is detected, it must be disabled or staff will leave the meeting. A state agency used a frontier model to write the solicitation and banned note-taking bots from the Q&A about it. Both positions are defensible; the juxtaposition is still remarkable, and it is the clearest sign yet that grant documents themselves are now AI-drafted artifacts.

Second, the Impact criterion lists among its scoring factors "Contribution to diversity, equity, inclusion, and access." At the federal level, the proposed Uniform Grants Regulation moves in precisely the opposite direction — restricting DEI-related activity and inserting political pre-issuance review. We covered that rewrite and its December 11 congressional freeze in our analysis of the OMB rule.

For organizations whose federal portfolio has become unpredictable, the relevant feature of Future Works is not its size. It is the funding source: state Reemployment funds, appropriated and administered in Harrisburg, scored by a Commonwealth committee, with no federal pass-through in the chain. Two million dollars is a modest program. Two million dollars that cannot be terminated for convenience by a federal agency is a different kind of modest.