If your school's research office doesn't have the tools you need, use someone else's. A list of links to such offices can be found at:
http://www.ncura.edu/resources/sponsored.htm. Find one that has better resources than your's does.
For federal grants, Grants.gov has decent search features and you can have e-mail sent to you when new RFP's are posted that match your criteria.
For foundations, you want foundationcenter.org - which has some free search ability (and subscriptions for the premium access).
COS.com (or COS.org - same place) is a wonderful resource for this, but it is subscription based. The subscriptions are generally set up such that anyone using a subscribing institution's computer system can access the site. Once there, they can create a userid which allows them to access the site from off-campus. If you know someone that is on such a campus, have them create an account for you (I guess this is theoretically bad, but at my school anyone could walk into the library and do this for themselves - I can't imagine COS cares much). In any event, COS will have almost everything on Grants.gov or at the Foundation Center.
