Assistance program
Ambassadors' Special Self Help Fund
$7.4 Million committed in FY2021–FY2026
- Agency
- State, Department of, State, Department of
- Assistance
- Not Applicable
- CFDA number
- 19.220
- What it does
- The U.S. Ambassadors' Special Self-Help program is a grass-roots assistance program that allows U.S. embassies to respond quickly to local requests for small community-based development projects. This Self-Help fund provides small, short-term grants to community groups that are working to improve the basic economic and social conditions of their communities. Special Self-Help projects help to improve basic economic or social conditions at the local community, or village level, and have long-lived value.
- Who benefits
- See the Notice of Funding Opportunity issued by the U.S. Embassy for the specific country on www.grants.gov.
- Who applies
- Non-profit, community based organizations with the ability to operate legally in country, focused on improving basic norms of a society. Local educational and civic institutions for the improvement of schools, orphanages, and other small-scale associations to benefit those in need.
Committed by fiscal year
* FY2026 is year-to-date — the fiscal year is still in progress, so its total is still filling in. The striped band and dashed line mark that provisional stretch.
Top recipients
By dollars committed.
How to read these numbers
- Committed through this program
Money committed under this assistance listing (its CFDA program), counted in the year each action happened.
- How it's paid
Most programs pay out one way — a grant, or a direct payment to individuals; the flow bar only appears when a program genuinely mixes types.
- Some recipients aren't itemized
For entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, the government reports one aggregate instead of naming tens of millions of people, so the recipient roster isn't part of the public record.
- Awards, counted once
An award count is the number of distinct awards with at least one action that year — each counted once, however many times it was amended.
- The colored bars
Every bar on this page splits by how the money moves:
Direct payments