Pipeline Grants Competition

Overview

The Pipeline Grants Competition seeks to support early- career scholars (Assistant Professors, Lecturers and Adjunct Assistant Professors) and promote diversity by prioritizing applications from scholars who are underrepresented in the social sciences. This includes racial, ethnic, gender, disciplinary, institutional, and geographic diversity.

The Pipeline Grants Competition seeks to advance innovative research on economic mobility and access to opportunity in the United States. We are interested in research focused on structural barriers to economic mobility and how individuals, communities and state entities understand, navigate and challenge systemic inequalities.

Below we provide some examples of topics and questions that are relevant to this competition. This list is not all-encompassing. Please find short descriptions of previously funded projects on our website.

Our priorities generally do not include analyses of health​ or mental health outcomes or health behaviors ​as these are priorities for other funders. ​For the same reason, RSF seldom supports studies focused on educational processes or curricular issues but does prioritize analyses of inequities in student achievement or educational attainment.

RSF has a long-standing goal of encouraging methodological diversity and inter-disciplinary collaboration. We are interested in novel uses of new or under-utilized data, and creative uses of administrative data or new data linkages across systems (e.g., in and across criminal justice, safety net, labor markets). Applicants might propose exploratory fieldwork, a pilot study, field or survey experiments, in-depth qualitative interviews, and/or ethnographies.

Areas of Interest: 

• Policy Impacts and Interventions
• Neighborhood Characteristics, Gentrification and Segregation
• Income & Wealth
• Climate Change & Natural Disasters
• Criminal Justice & the Legal System-Young Adults of Color, Social Movements, and Democracy
• Accessing the Safety Net
• Labor Markets
• Immigrants, Immigration, and Immigrant Integration Policies
• Education

Only faculty who have not previously received a research grant or a visiting fellowship from RSF are eligible to apply.

Applicants can apply for either the Pipeline Grants Competition or the November 7, deadline for LOIs for presidential and trustee grants, but not both. 

Individual applicants can apply for grants of up to $35,000, and teams of eligible applicants can apply for grants of up to $50,000. 

RSF expects to fund about 20 one-year projects by assistant professors, lecturers, and adjunct assistant professors.