OVW Fiscal Year 2025 Electronic Service Protection Order Court Pilot Program- Invitation to Apply | O OVW 2025 172420

Opportunity Information: Apply for O OVW 2025 172420

The OVW Fiscal Year 2025 Electronic Service Protection Order Court Pilot Program (Invitation to Apply) is a discretionary grant opportunity from the U.S. Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women (OVW), designed to help courts modernize how protection orders are served. The core purpose of the pilot is to support state, territorial, and Tribal courts in developing and implementing programs that allow protection orders to be served properly and legally through electronic communication methods. In practical terms, the program is aimed at improving the speed, reliability, and documentation of service while still meeting due process requirements and ensuring that service is valid under applicable law and court rules. Because it is a pilot program, it is structured to help a limited number of courts stand up or refine approaches that could later inform broader best practices.

This opportunity is explicitly invite-only, meaning only courts that have been invited by OVW are expected to apply. Eligible applicants are limited to state courts, territorial courts, and Tribal courts, reflecting the program focus on court-led implementation rather than community-based or law enforcement-led projects. The grant is categorized under Law, Justice, and Legal Services and is listed under CFDA number 16.062, which aligns with OVW funding streams supporting legal and justice system responses to violence.

The funding opportunity number is O-OVW-2025-172420, and applications are due by August 13, 2025. OVW anticipates making up to four awards under this solicitation, with an award ceiling of $1,500,000 per award. That ceiling signals that OVW expects these projects to involve significant planning, technology or vendor coordination, policy development, legal analysis, training, and implementation work, rather than small-scale experiments. The opportunity was created on July 30, 2025, and uses the grant funding instrument type.

Overall, the pilot is about building court capacity to use electronic means (such as email, text, approved electronic service platforms, or other secure digital delivery methods) to serve protection orders in a way that is legally sound, verifiable, and consistent with victim safety. Courts pursuing this type of work typically must address questions such as how to confirm identity and receipt, how to document service for the court record, how to handle confidentiality and protected information, how to reduce opportunities for intimidation or retaliation, and how to ensure the electronic process fits within existing statutes, procedural rules, and enforcement practices. The limited number of expected awards and the invite-only structure indicate OVW is targeting jurisdictions positioned to implement and evaluate these methods at a meaningful scale, generating lessons that can be shared with other courts in future years.

• The Office on Violence Against Women in the law, justice and legal services sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "OVW Fiscal Year 2025 Electronic Service Protection Order Court Pilot Program- Invitation to Apply" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 16.062.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2025-07-30.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2025-08-13. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $1,500,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 4 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Others.

Apply for O OVW 2025 172420

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