Vision Grants

Overview

The Spencer Foundation invests in research to improve education, broadly conceived. We have identified a critical need for innovative, methodologically and disciplinarily diverse, large-scale research projects to transform education systems for equity. To stimulate research that addresses this need, the Spencer Foundation is investing in a new program designed to provide scholars with the time, space, resources, and support to plan a large-scale study or program of research: geared toward real-world impact on equity; based on research across disciplines and methods; reliant on meaningful collaboration with practitioners, policymakers, and communities; and focused on transforming educational systems. 

The Vision Grants program funds the collaborative planning of innovative, methodologically diverse, interdisciplinary research on education that contributes to transforming education systems for equity. We believe that visionary and cross-disciplinary/multi-method scholarship, conducted in generative collaboration with stakeholders in the field, including policy-makers, practitioners, and communities, can contribute to reimagining and transforming educational systems toward equity. 

Vision Grants will provide planning funds for teams to develop proposals for research projects that: 

• Are focused on key challenges and opportunities that have the potential for increasing equity in education
• Engage across disciplines and/or research methods
• Collaborate with practitioners, policymakers, and communities (and other stakeholders)
• Have clear sightlines to transformational change through research at a systemic level

The Vision Grants allow teams to join together and generate ideas for collaborative scholarship that develops a new vision of what equitable educational systems can look like, consider which disciplines have taken up these issues previously (and why they have fallen short or encountered limitations), and foreground important ideas that will allow new and ambitious research to emerge.

For example, Vision Grants might lead to research projects that:

• Develop a new policy, pedagogical approach, practice, or intervention, e.g., at the K-12 or post-secondary level, that has the potential to have a transformative and systemic impact and explore the feasibility of implementing it at the state or local level, or within a system.
• Build upon approaches or policies that have worked well in one setting, with the goal of studying them in a range of settings to better understand how, where, and with whom they work and why.
• Work in partnership with youth at the city, state or federal level to reimagine the choices young people have to learn beyond school.
• Work with communities to co-design approaches that improve educational equity by working across sectors (e.g., education and health, housing, criminal justice).
• Connect scholars with legal teams to impact litigation strategies in local, state, or federal contexts of educational inequity.
• Rethink effective approaches to teacher and educational leader preparation, learning, and development, and partner with systems of teacher and leader preparation and/or accreditation to enact changes that would increase the diversity and robustness of the educator and leader pathways.

• Proposals to the Vision Grant program must be for developing research projects.
• Proposed budgets for this program are limited to $75,000 total and may not include indirect cost charges per Spencer’s policy.
• The Vision Grant may not be longer than 12 months in duration.

• The Intent to Apply is required to submit a proposal to the Vision Grants program. 
• Full Proposals are due September 14, 2023.
• PIs and Co-PIs may apply for a Vision Grant if they have another active research grant from the Spencer Foundation or if they have another Spencer grant proposal in review.
• All awarded Vision Grantees will have the option to apply for a Transformative Research Grant, with awards to carry out the planned research project (budgets up to $3.5M).