Where do you look for free grants? The search must be thorough or it could be an exercise in futility. You'll probably have to go through a whole lot of seemingly useless leads before you find one that leads somewhere. Maybe we could point you a bit in the right direction.

The first place you should go to are the web sites of the government agencies. Look for the ones that are inclined to handle your program. If you are a student, then you could start your search for a scholarship at the Department of Education website. A natural disaster victim? Then go to the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) web site. Here are a few more free grant searches you could do. You could surf through these web sites and see if they have programs that could be a fit as far as your project is concerned.

These are the sites of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Education Grants and Contracts Information, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Stopping Violence Against Women and Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS). You'll also find that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) offers over 300 programs, all run by various different agencies which have free grants.

If you want to look at some other sources, you could take a look at some online search resources like Non-profit Gateway, The Foundation Center and Grantsnet.

Students should definitely search on the FAFSA site. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid website (http://www.fafsa.ed.gov/) gives you a lot of information about where to look for free student grants, details of campus-based aid programs and how too avail of loans.

If you're clued in to how to apply for grants, you could go to the CFDA or Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance site at http://www.cfda.gov/. This site has entries on each program but the terminology used could sound like Greek to someone who is not well-acquainted with the intricacies of the whole free grant money scenario. They also give you detailed explanations on how to apply, how the money is to be used, the review-and-award process they use and what exactly is expected of you when you are given the grant.

The President just launched a site called http://GovBenefits.com. It is a free online grant site that hopes to lessen paperwork and increase efficiency by making more information available online. This hopefully means less bureaucracy and more focus on the citizen. Searching for free grants on the Internet suddenly makes it so much more accessible and close to home.