Ca Grants MCP Server

@pipeworx/ca-grants

California Grants Portal MCP — open State of California grant funding opportunities: who administers them, who may apply, how much money is available, and when applications are due. Keyless.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1476+ live data sources.

Tools

• ca_search_grants(query?, status?, category?, applicant_type?, limit?, offset?) — free-text search over California state grant opportunities, filterable by status, category, and eligible applicant type. Defaults to status="active".
• ca_get_grant(portal_id) — the full record for one grant: purpose, description, eligibility notes, geography, funding source, matching-funds requirement, award amounts, funding method, contact info, and links.
• ca_grants_closing_soon(days?, category?, applicant_type?, limit?) — active grants with a fixed deadline in the next N days (default 30), soonest first, plus a count of rolling Ongoing opportunities.
• ca_grants_by_agency(agency, status?, limit?, offset?) — grants from one California department/agency, matched as a forgiving case-insensitive substring, with a status breakdown.
• ca_list_grant_categories(status?) — the category, applicant-type, agency, and status values actually present in the data, each with a grant count, so filter values can be read off real data.

Auth

Keyless. No API key, no BYO credentials.

Data sources

• Dataset: https://data.ca.gov/dataset/california-grants-portal
• Endpoint: https://data.ca.gov/api/3/action/datastore_search
• Resource id: 111c8c88-21f6-453c-ae2c-b4785a0624f5 (~1,974 rows, refreshed daily)
• Human portal: https://www.grants.ca.gov/

Gotchas

Field ids are TitleCase (AgencyDept, ApplicationDeadline, EstAvailFunds) and getting the case wrong makes CKAN silently return nothing rather than erroring, so every field name in this pack is spelled from the live fields list. Every value is stored as text, which has three consequences. EstAvailFunds is a display string like "$750,000" and EstAmounts is often a range like "Between $1 and $375,000" — this pack deliberately exposes no numeric minimum-amount filter, because any such filter would have to guess at ranges; est_available_funds_approx parses the leading figure as advisory context only and is never filtered on. Categories and ApplicantType are semicolon-joined lists ("Nonprofit; Public Agency; Tribal Government"), so they are split per-atom and matched case-insensitively client-side rather than through CKAN filters, which only does equality/IN. And ApplicationDeadline is text: usually "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS", but 127 of the 177 currently-active rows hold the literal string "Ongoing" (rolling intake, no due date) with one row null — so deadline math happens client-side and ca_grants_closing_soon reports ongoing_no_deadline as its own bucket rather than dropping two-thirds of the open grants on the floor. Deadline timestamps carry no timezone and are treated as UTC, which is accurate to within a day. Status takes exactly three values (active 177, closed 1,796, forecasted 1), so unfiltered searches are dominated by expired opportunities and ca_search_grants defaults to active. Because CKAN cannot do substring matching, ca_grants_by_agency resolves the caller's fragment against the 73 distinct AgencyDept values in one projected scan, then filters server-side on the exact names it matched.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ca-grants": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/ca-grants/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/ca-grants/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1476+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Ca Grants data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT