grants.illinois.gov

search-csfa

Installation

Adds this website's skill for your agents

 

Summary

Search the Illinois Catalog of State Financial Assistance (CSFA) for currently-posted funding opportunities by keyword, issuing agency, CSFA number, or award range — returns grant name, formal CSFA number, agency, posting period, award range, funding type, eligibility tags, unwrapped application-portal URL (AmpliFund / native CSFA NOFO), and attached NOFO PDF links. Read-only.

SKILL.md
262 lines

Illinois CSFA Funding Opportunity Search

Purpose

Return the list of currently-posted funding opportunities from the Illinois Catalog of State Financial Assistance (CSFA) — for each match, the grant title, formal CSFA number, issuing agency (full name + 3-digit ID), posting/due dates, award range, funding type, eligibility tags, the unwrapped application-portal URL (AmpliFund / SmartSheet / direct CSFA NOFO), and any attached NOFO PDF URLs. Supports keyword, agency, CSFA-number, and award-range filters; date-range and funding-type filters are applied after enriching each row with its NOFO detail page. Read-only — never submits an application or interest form.

When to Use

  • "What grants are currently open from the Illinois Department of Human Services?"
  • "Find Illinois state grants matching 'early childhood' / 'public safety' / 'transportation'."
  • "Look up CSFA 420-35-0083 — when does it close and where do I apply?"
  • "List all currently-posted CSFA opportunities with award maxima above $1M."
  • Any flow that needs structured CSFA opportunity data without the user clicking through the ASP.NET UI.

Workflow

CSFA is hosted at omb.illinois.gov/public/gata/csfa/*.aspx (the bare grants.illinois.gov domain 1s-redirects to the GATA portal). The portal looks like a classic ASP.NET WebForms app — __VIEWSTATE / __VIEWSTATEGENERATOR hidden fields, .aspx endpoints — but OpportunityList.aspx has no form filters and no postback machinery. A single un-parameterised GET returns every currently-posted opportunity (184 rows on 2026-05-18) as one static HTML table. Verified across multiple probe queries: passing ?Search=transportation, ?Agency=494, etc. to OpportunityList.aspx is silently ignored — the response is byte-identical. Filter client-side after parsing. No __EVENTTARGET postbacks are required; no browser session is required; no proxies are required (public US government site, no anti-bot wall observed).

Lead with the HTTP/HTML path — it costs one round-trip (~1.5s, ~65 KB) and returns the full list. The browser fallback is only useful if browse cloud fetch itself is unavailable in your environment.

  1. Fetch the full opportunity list (one GET):

    GET https://omb.illinois.gov/public/gata/csfa/OpportunityList.aspx

    Equivalently via the CLI: browse cloud fetch "https://omb.illinois.gov/public/gata/csfa/OpportunityList.aspx". The response is text/html; charset=utf-8, Microsoft-IIS / ASP.NET 4.0. The total count is rendered as a literal element near the bottom: <div id="divCount">Opportunities: 184</div> — capture it so the caller knows the slice is the full universe (no pagination).

  2. Parse the result table. The DOM contains one <table id="tblList"> with a 4-column header (Opportunity Title | Agency | Application Date Range | Award Range) and one <tr> per opportunity. The cell shapes are stable across runs:

    • col 1 — title cell. Two flavours, distinguished by an <i class='gms'>GMS</i> prefix:
      • GMS-wrapped (74% of rows, 2026-05-18): <i Class='gms'>GMS</i>&nbsp;<a href='GMS.aspx?url=<URL-ENC-AmpliFund>&title=<URL-ENC-title>' target='_blank'>{title}</a>. Unwrap: URL-decode the url= query param to get the inner https://il.amplifund.com/Public/Opportunities/Details/{guid} URL. That guid is the AmpliFund opportunity ID and is the only stable identifier for these rows (no CSFA nofo id exists in the OpportunityList row for GMS-wrapped entries — you must drill into AmpliFund to get the formal CSFA number).
      • Native CSFA NOFO (26%): <a href='Opportunity.aspx?nofo={N}'>{title}</a>. Capture the integer nofo query param — it's the row PK for Opportunity.aspx.
    • col 2 — agency: {LETTER_CODE} ({3-DIGIT_ID}), e.g. AG (406), AGE (402), DCEO (420), DHS (444), DOT (494). The letter code is a non-standard shorthand (AGE = "Department On Aging", not "AGEncy") — always cross-reference the numeric ID, never the letters, against the agency map in step 3.
    • col 3 — application date range: MM/DD/YYYY - MM/DD/YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY - No end date (open-ended announcements). Parse as {posted_date, due_date} with due_date = null when the literal string is No end date.
    • col 4 — award range: $X - $Y with no thousands separators (e.g. $83853 - $1151270). Strip $, parse as integers in USD.

  3. Map the agency id to a full name (one-time GET, cached):

    GET https://omb.illinois.gov/public/gata/csfa/AgencyList.aspx

    The page contains 31 anchors of the form <a href='ProgramList.aspx?Agency={id}'>{Full Name} ({id})</a>. Build a {id → full_name} dict once per session and reuse for every opportunity. The full names match what end users expect ("Department Of Human Services (444)", "Department Of Transportation (494)"); the letter shorthand in column 2 of OpportunityList does not.

  4. Apply filters client-side on the parsed list. The OpportunityList page exposes no server-side filtering — every filter the caller supplies is a post-parse operation:

    • keyword — case-insensitive substring match against the title. (To also cover the program-level short description / objective text, you must fetch the per-NOFO Program.aspx page in step 5; the list view never carries the short description.)
    • issuing-agency name — fuzzy-match the supplied agency name against the values from step 3 to derive the numeric id, then keep rows whose col-2 numeric id equals that id. Aliases worth normalising before matching: ISBE→586, DHS→444, IDOT→494, IEMA→588, DCEO→420, DCFS→418, ICCB→684, DNR→422, IDPH→482.
    • CSFA-number (NNN-NN-NNNN) — first try a substring match on the title (titles often embed the formal CSFA number, e.g. "FY26 406-46-0552 Partners for Conservation"). If no hit, drill into each row's NOFO detail (step 5) and match against div_CSFA_Number. The first prefix segment of a CSFA number is always the issuing-agency id, so you can short-circuit by filtering to rows whose col-2 id matches that prefix before drilling.
    • award range — parse col 4 to award_min / award_max integers and apply numeric predicates.
    • due-by date — parse col 3 right-hand side; treat No end date as +∞.
    • posted-after date — parse col 3 left-hand side.
    • funding type (Grant / Loan / Cooperative Agreement) — not surfaced in the list view; must drill into Opportunity.aspx?nofo=N and read div_Assistance_Type. For GMS-wrapped rows this means fetching the AmpliFund detail page (which uses a different schema and is JS-rendered — see gotcha).
    • posting status — OpportunityList.aspx only ever returns "Currently posted" opportunities. The CSFA public surface does not expose closed or anticipated opportunities — if the caller asked for those, return {"results": [], "note": "status=closed|anticipated is not retrievable via the public OpportunityList page"}.

  5. (Optional) Enrich each match with per-NOFO detail. Only do this for the filtered subset — drilling all 184 costs 184 extra GETs.

    • Native CSFA NOFO (nofo_id present): GET https://omb.illinois.gov/public/gata/csfa/Opportunity.aspx?nofo={N} returns a <table id="tblMain"> with named <div id="div_*"> fields. The stable ones: div_Awarding_Agency_Name, div_Awarding_Agency_Contact, div_Type_Announcement, div_Assistance_Type (Grant/Loan/Cooperative Agreement), div_Agency_Opportunity_Number, div_Agency_Opportunity_Title, div_CSFA_Number (formal NNN-NN-NNNN), div_CSFA_Popular_Name, div_Anticipated_Awards, div_Estimated_Total_Award_Amount, div_Single_Award_Range, div_Funding_Source, div_Cost_Sharing_Match_Required, div_Indirect_Cost_Allowed, div_Posted_Date, div_Application_Range, div_Grant_Application_URL (often a SmartSheet/AmpliFund/external link, sometimes prefixed by literal "Please copy the entire address below and paste it into the browser..." instruction text — strip it), div_Technical_Assistance_Session, div_Attachments. The attachments cell contains zero-or-more <a href='FileView.aspx?nofo={N}' target='_blank'>{filename}.pdf</a> — these are the NOFO PDF URLs.
    • Program-level data (Short Description, Objective, Eligible Applicants tags, statutory authority) lives one level up, at Program.aspx?csfa={CSFA_PK}. The link to it is in the breadcrumb of Opportunity.aspx: <a href="Program.aspx?csfa={N}" id="lnk_Program">Program</a>. The Program page has: div_Short_Desc, div_Objective, div_Eligible_Applicants (semicolon-separated tags like "Nonprofit Organizations; Education Organizations;"), div_Applicant_Eligibility (long narrative), div_Fed_Authorization, div_IL_Statute_Authorization, div_Agency_Contact. Important — the csfa= query value on Program.aspx is a row PK, not the formal NNN-NN-NNNN number. To go from a formal CSFA number to a program page, prefer GET ProgramList.aspx?Search={formal-csfa-number} and read the Program.aspx?csfa={pk} href out of the result row.
    • GMS-wrapped row (no nofo_id): fetch the unwrapped AmpliFund URL from step 2 — https://il.amplifund.com/Public/Opportunities/Details/{guid}. AmpliFund is JS-rendered, so the bare HTTP fetch returns a thin shell with no opportunity data — this is the one case that needs a browser session (open with browse open --remote against a Browserbase session). The AmpliFund page exposes a "Eligibility" sidebar, a downloadable NOFO PDF, and the formal CSFA number under "Internal ID". If you only need the dates/award/agency that are already in the OpportunityList row, skip the AmpliFund drill entirely.

  6. Single-record lookup by formal CSFA number (NNN-NN-NNNN input shape): the fastest path skips OpportunityList.aspx and goes:

    GET https://omb.illinois.gov/public/gata/csfa/ProgramList.aspx?Search={formal-csfa-number}

    This is a server-side filter (verified — ?Search=Specialty+Crop returns 1 row, ?Search=transportation returns N rows). The response is a single-row table with <a href='Program.aspx?csfa={pk}'>{name}</a> — follow it. To find currently-open opportunities for that program, the Program page's breadcrumb back to OpportunityList and the Active Opportunities column on ProgramList indicate count; the per-program opportunity drill-down requires either parsing GATA's GMS portal or matching back into OpportunityList.aspx by agency id + program title substring.

Browser fallback

Only useful if browse cloud fetch is blocked or rate-limited (not observed on this site as of 2026-05-18). The page is iframe-embeddable (the body emits parent.postMessage(document.body.scrollHeight, "*") on load) and renders entirely server-side, so it works fine in a bare Browserbase session — no --proxies, no --verified:

sid=$(browse cloud sessions create --keep-alive | jq -r .id)
export BROWSE_SESSION="$sid"
browse open "https://omb.illinois.gov/public/gata/csfa/OpportunityList.aspx" --remote
browse wait load --remote
browse get html body --remote > /tmp/opplist.html
# … then parse the same `<table id="tblList">` as in step 2.
browse cloud sessions update "$sid" --status REQUEST_RELEASE

The browse snapshot accessibility tree is overkill — the table is fully present in the rendered HTML, and grabbing the raw body via browse get html body skips a11y-tree assembly cost.

Site-Specific Gotchas

  • No anti-bot, no proxies needed. omb.illinois.gov is a public US-government IIS site that serves the full HTML directly to anonymous requests with no JS challenge, no CAPTCHA, no rate-limit observed across the probe runs (4 fetches of the 65 KB OpportunityList in under 60 s, all 200 OK, no --proxies, no --verified). Don't waste budget on Verified sessions for this site.
  • OpportunityList.aspx is not a real WebForms search page — despite the __VIEWSTATE / __VIEWSTATEGENERATOR hidden inputs and the <form method="post" action="./OpportunityList.aspx"> wrapper, the page exposes zero <select> / <input type='text'> filter controls. The form is vestigial; the entire table is rendered server-side from the underlying dbo.NOFO query unfiltered. Posting back __EVENTTARGET does nothing. Pretending it's a postback-driven form is the #1 trap a future agent will fall into (the user-supplied task description suggests this; reality contradicts it).
  • Query parameters on OpportunityList.aspx are silently ignored. ?Agency=NNN, ?Search=keyword, ?CSFA=..., ?Status=... all return the byte-identical 184-row response. Don't infer filter support from CSFA's other pages — ProgramList.aspx does honor ?Agency= and ?Search=, but OpportunityList.aspx does not.
  • The list is "currently posted" only. Closed and "Anticipated" opportunities don't appear on OpportunityList.aspx at all. There's no public surface for them on CSFA. If a caller asks for Closed/Anticipated, fail honestly with an explanatory note (see step 4 above).
  • The agency column letter code is non-standard. AGE = "Department On Aging" (not Agency), SBEL = "State Board Of Elections", ICCB = "Illinois Community College Board", etc. Map by the numeric id in parens — that's the stable foreign key into AgencyList.aspx. Some agencies (e.g. DCEO) match popular acronyms; never assume the letter code does.
  • GMS-wrapped rows (74% of the table) hide the formal CSFA number. The OpportunityList row for a GMS opportunity has no nofo id and no formal CSFA number on the row — the agency id is the only structured field. To recover the CSFA number you either (a) regex it out of the title string (many AmpliFund titles embed it, e.g. "FY26 406-46-0552 Partners for Conservation"), or (b) drive AmpliFund (JS-rendered) to read "Internal ID" off the opportunity page. Path (a) is ~80% reliable based on the titles seen; path (b) is reliable but costs a browser session.
  • GMS.aspx is a redirect wrapper, not a data page. Hitting GMS.aspx?url=... returns a meta-refresh / JS redirect to AmpliFund. URL-decode the url= query param client-side to get the inner AmpliFund URL — don't fetch GMS.aspx itself.
  • AmpliFund is JS-rendered. https://il.amplifund.com/Public/Opportunities/Details/{guid} returns a thin React shell to bare HTTP — body content (eligibility, description, attachments) is loaded async. If you need AmpliFund-side data, open with a real browser session (browse open --remote) and wait for load; bare browse cloud fetch is not sufficient. Conversely, everything in the OpportunityList row (title, agency, dates, award range) is authoritative server-side — for the 80% case you can stay entirely on omb.illinois.gov.
  • Award range numbers have no thousands separators. $83853 not $83,853. Naïve $ + comma stripping won't bite, but a regex anchored on \$[\d,]+ will produce confusing matches. Use \$(\d+) instead.
  • Open-ended announcements: "MM/DD/YYYY - No end date". Treat the right side as null / open. ~5–10% of rows in the 2026-05-18 sample had no end date.
  • Program.aspx?csfa={pk} uses a row PK, not the formal CSFA number. The csfa=20 you see in <a href='Program.aspx?csfa=20'>10.555 National School Lunch Program</a> is not 402-03-0020 — it's the database integer PK. Going from formal NNN-NN-NNNN → Program page requires the ProgramList.aspx?Search={formal-num} intermediate.
  • Opportunity.aspx contact emails are wrapped in literal display text. Example: <div id="div_Awarding_Agency_Contact">Ericka A. White (Ericka.White@illinois.gov)</div>. Parse out the email with <> or () delimiters depending on the row.
  • Grant_Application_URL is sometimes a SmartSheet form, not an AmpliFund URL. Example seen: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/2e2ff9e69bc64acdb64eb5894c672f01. Treat it as a generic external URL — do not assume AmpliFund.
  • FileView.aspx?nofo={N} returns the NOFO PDF directly. Content-type application/pdf, attachment disposition. Filename is in the div_Attachments anchor text. If div_Attachments is empty, the NOFO PDF is on the AmpliFund side (for GMS-wrapped rows) — see the "GMS-wrapped" gotcha.
  • grants.illinois.gov is a 1s meta-refresh redirect to gata.illinois.gov. The CSFA app itself lives at omb.illinois.gov/public/gata/csfa/. Always navigate to the omb.illinois.gov URL directly; the redirect chain wastes a round-trip and gata.illinois.gov/grantee-portal/csfa.html 404s.
  • READ-ONLY. Some Grant_Application_URL links go to one-click SmartSheet interest forms. Never auto-fill or submit those — stop at the detail page.

Expected Output

{
  "total_currently_posted": 184,
  "total_matched": 3,
  "filters_applied": {
    "keyword": "specialty crop",
    "agency_name": null,
    "agency_id": null,
    "csfa_number": null,
    "award_min_floor": null,
    "award_max_ceiling": null,
    "posted_after": null,
    "due_before": null,
    "funding_type": null
  },
  "results": [
    {
      "grant_name": "FY27 Specialty Crop Block Grant Program",
      "csfa_number": "406-32-0039",
      "issuing_agency": {
        "id": 406,
        "letter_code": "AG",
        "full_name": "Department Of Agriculture"
      },
      "opportunity_status": "currently_posted",
      "posting_period": {
        "posted_date": "2026-05-07",
        "due_date": "2026-06-05"
      },
      "funding_range_usd": {
        "award_min": 0,
        "award_max": 75000
      },
      "funding_type": "Grant",
      "short_description": null,
      "eligibility_tags": null,
      "detail_page_url": "https://il.amplifund.com/Public/Opportunities/Details/7a9e3a6d-9f4d-4e86-899a-e62c203caf2d",
      "source_row_type": "gms_amplifund",
      "csfa_opportunity_url": null,
      "nofo_pdf_urls": []
    },
    {
      "grant_name": "Community Development Block Grant Disaster Response Program",
      "csfa_number": "420-22-2010",
      "issuing_agency": {
        "id": 420,
        "letter_code": "DCEO",
        "full_name": "Department Of Commerce And Economic Opportunity"
      },
      "opportunity_status": "currently_posted",
      "posting_period": {
        "posted_date": "2022-04-05",
        "due_date": null
      },
      "funding_range_usd": {
        "award_min": 0,
        "award_max": 250000
      },
      "funding_type": "Grant",
      "short_description": "Disaster response block grants distributed to units of local government in declared-disaster areas.",
      "eligibility_tags": ["Government Organizations"],
      "detail_page_url": "https://omb.illinois.gov/public/gata/csfa/Opportunity.aspx?nofo=2010",
      "source_row_type": "csfa_native",
      "csfa_opportunity_url": "https://omb.illinois.gov/public/gata/csfa/Opportunity.aspx?nofo=2010",
      "nofo_pdf_urls": [
        "https://omb.illinois.gov/public/gata/csfa/FileView.aspx?nofo=2010"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "notes": [
    "OpportunityList.aspx returns only currently-posted opportunities; Closed and Anticipated statuses are not retrievable from the public surface.",
    "GMS-wrapped rows (74% of the table on 2026-05-18) do not carry a formal CSFA number in the list view — recover it from the title regex or by drilling into AmpliFund."
  ]
}

Fields that are null indicate "not surfaced in the list view; would require per-NOFO drill-down to populate". The skill can run in two modes — list-only (one GET, ~1.5 s, ~65 KB; nulls for description / funding_type / eligibility_tags / nofo_pdf_urls on GMS rows) and enriched (one GET per matched native NOFO; AmpliFund drill for GMS rows if requested). Return source_row_type: "gms_amplifund" | "csfa_native" so the caller knows which fields are authoritative.

Single-record CSFA-number lookup output

{
  "lookup_csfa_number": "420-35-0083",
  "program": {
    "csfa_number": "420-35-0083",
    "csfa_popular_name": "SBDC",
    "program_name": "Small Business Development Centers",
    "agency": { "id": 420, "full_name": "Department Of Commerce And Economic Opportunity" },
    "short_description": "Seeking qualified host organizations to operate Small Business Development Centers and Satellite Centers and provide program services.",
    "eligibility_tags": ["Nonprofit Organizations", "Education Organizations"],
    "federal_authorization": "Section 21 of the Small Business Act (15 U.S.C. § 648)",
    "il_statute_authorization": "20 ILCS 605/605-500",
    "program_page_url": "https://omb.illinois.gov/public/gata/csfa/Program.aspx?csfa=83"
  },
  "active_opportunities": [
    {
      "grant_name": "Small Business Development Centers — FY26-2",
      "agency_opportunity_number": "FY26-2",
      "funding_type": "Grant",
      "posting_period": { "posted_date": "2025-12-19", "due_date": null },
      "funding_range_usd": { "award_min": 80000, "award_max": 525000 },
      "detail_page_url": "https://omb.illinois.gov/public/gata/csfa/Opportunity.aspx?nofo=4224",
      "nofo_pdf_urls": ["https://omb.illinois.gov/public/gata/csfa/FileView.aspx?nofo=4224"]
    }
  ]
}

Empty / no-match output

{
  "total_currently_posted": 184,
  "total_matched": 0,
  "filters_applied": { "keyword": "quantum computing", "...": "..." },
  "results": [],
  "notes": ["No currently-posted CSFA opportunity matched the supplied filters. OpportunityList.aspx returns only currently-posted; ask about ProgramList.aspx for the broader program catalog."]
}