Why Cooperative Contracts & Federal Funds are a Perfect Match

The COVID-19 pandemic has had its share of unfortunate impacts on procurement, but if there’s a silver lining it’s that it resulted in a handful of federal funding grants becoming available to different entities. Thanks to the CARES, CRRSA, and ARP acts, hundreds of billions of dollars in federal emergency aid have become available. Over the last couple years, we’ve seen more investment in public education than ever before, largely by way of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds.

These funds are aimed at upgrading school facilities to keep our children, teachers, and school staff safe. That level of importance is exactly why the funds must be used as efficiently as possible. When it comes to federal funding, it’s hard to get more efficient than cooperative contracts.

Why Are Cooperative Contracts a Perfect Match for ESSER Funds?

Obviously, maximizing the potential of your federal funding should be main priority for any public agency. Using cooperative contracts allows districts to compare already competitively bid contracts and, in many cases, negotiate better pricing.

Cooperative contracts offer schools and districts the chance to combine their purchasing power to get better pricing. Thanks to some of the commonalities between school needs across local, state, and national districts, schools can all order from the same supplier or contract, giving them more leverage. That’s one of the many reasons cooperative purchasing is becoming more popular among school business professionals.

How Does Cooperative Purchasing Help Agencies be More Efficient?

It’s also no secret that many of those tasked with procurement have a lot on their plate. In many cases, procurement is just a small aspect of their week-to-week workload. Cooperative contracts are often already competitively bid, allowing agencies to save time and money in the process. CompareCoOps can help you skip the bidding process and go straight to obtaining and comparing quotes from coopearive suppliers.

If you work for a public agency, you already know that guidelines for using cooperative purchasing for federal funding can be stringent. Compliance is extremely important for schools utilizing ESSER funds. That’s another area where CompareCoOps can be a huge help. Using our built-in templates, mandatory questions and evaluation tools, everything is tracked and saved in an electronic audit report.

ESSER funds have been a huge lift to schools looking to create the safest environments possible for their students at this crucial time. Safety is obviously paramount in times like these, and finding ways to get the most out of ESSER funding through cooperative purchasing can help schools bring that safety to the next level.

Want to get the most out of your federal funding? Learn how CompareCoOps can help or sign up today for free.

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