Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Pioneering Ideas: Exploring the Future to Build a Culture of Health

Overview:

Pioneering Ideas: Exploring the Future to Build a Culture of Health seeks proposals that are primed to influence health equity in the future. We are interested in ideas that address any of these four areas of focus: Future of Evidence; Future of Social Interaction; Future of Food; Future of Work. Additionally, we welcome ideas that might fall outside of these four focus areas, but which offer unique approaches to advancing health equity and our progress toward a Culture of Health.

We want to hear from scientists, anthropologists, artists, urban planners, community leaders—anyone, anywhere who has a new or unconventional idea that could alter the trajectory of health, and improve health equity and well-being for generations to come. The changes we seek require diverse perspectives and cannot be accomplished by any one person, organization or sector.

Please note: While this call for proposals is focused on broader and longer-term societal trends and shifts that were evolving prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, we recognize the unique circumstances and learning created by the COVID-19 pandemic may inform your response. It is at your discretion whether you propose a project related to the pandemic directly or indirectly.

As our current reality underscores, we live in a dynamic world—where unforeseen global events; new technologies; scientific discoveries; changes in our climate, economy, demographics; and more—continually shape where and how we live, learn, work and play. These changes will profoundly impact health equity in our society, from our individual health and the health of our families to the health of our communities.

What dramatic changes might we see in the next 5 to 15 years? What can we do today to create a better, more equitable tomorrow?

We seek to answer these questions, anticipate the future, and support unconventional approaches and breakthrough ideas that can help lead the way to a future where everyone in the United States can live their healthiest life possible.

Proposals will be accepted throughout the year on a rolling admission. The average Pioneer grant in 2019 was $315,031. However, there is not an explicit range for budget requests. Grant periods are flexible, though generally range from 1 to 3 years.

Safeway Foundation - Nourishing Neighbors

Overview:

Albertsons Companies, Safeway and Vons Foundations funds organizations that strengthen the neighborhoods we serve. Organizations we fund must serve the community where we operate.

We support nonprofit organizations whose mission is aligned with our priority areas:

• Health and Human Services
• Hunger
• Youth and Education
• Veterans
• Supporting Diversity and Inclusion of All Abilities

We review applications four times throughout the year. At the close of the application process, it typically takes us at least 8 WEEKS to review and get back to you.

TIP:  To Strengthen Your Application – Include an Employee Sponsor.  Typically, an employee sponsor is a volunteer, board member or someone who has been helped by your organization.

Solicitation limitations:

The foundation typically does not provide seed money.

The Foundation generally does not fund:
• Individuals or for-profit organizations
• Political organizations or activities
• Religious organizations for religious purposes
• Capital or building campaigns
• Advocacy programs
• Meetings, conferences, or workshops
• Sports teams or athletic competitions
• Other foundations or granting organizations
• Fundraising dinners, galas, and events.

Charles Koch Foundation Grants

Overview:

The Charles Koch Foundation supports research that spurs social progress, contributing to a society of mutual benefit. It supports research from individuals seeking innovative solutions. The best way to find out if your project request is a good match with the goals and vision of the Foundation is to submit an online grant proposal.

Education specific Focus:
Every individual is unique and has potential to contribute to society. The purpose of education is to unlock that potential by helping learners discover their aptitudes and interests, develop skills, and then deploy that knowledge to benefit themselves and others. Education should inspire curiosity, creativity, and the desire to contribute.  We envision a society where everyone has opportunities to pursue lifelong learning and drive their own success. In postsecondary education, this includes access to a two- or four-year degree, as well as an expanding pool of educational pathways that are high-quality, individualized, and relevant to opportunities of the 21st century.

Research and Education Priorities:

• Better methods for identifying and communicating learner outcomes
• Individualized educational experiences
• New technologies and operating models that better align incentives to improve access and quality
• Identifying and addressing barriers to innovation
• Increased flexibility and hands-on learning (including stackable credentials, apprenticeships, and work-study programs)

Other focus areas for funding include:
Criminal Justice, Economic Opportunity, Foreign Policy, Free Speech & Peace, Health Care, Immigration, Principled Entrepreneurship, Science of Liberty, and Technology & Innovation.

Solicitation limitations:

Among other items, the Foundation is not able to support:

• Percentage-based overheard costs - Overhead includes, but is not limited to, insufficiently specified and/or insufficiently detailed overhead costs (e.g., a requirement that a fixed percentage of a grant amount be dedicated to grant administration) and fringe benefits.
• Applied Research and Development
• Community development
• Infrastructure
• Cultural exchange programs
• Economic development
• Medical treatment

Charles Koch Foundation Postsecondary Education Grants

Overview:

The Charles Koch Foundation supports research that spurs social progress, contributing to a society of mutual benefit. It supports research from individuals seeking innovative solutions.

Education should help people discover, develop, and deploy their unique aptitudes and gifts. However, millions of learners experience the opposite: a one-size-fits-all model that prizes exclusivity and standardization over meeting individual needs. Every person is unique and deserves a learning experience that empowers them to achieve success—however they define it. We are eager to partner with social entrepreneurs and organizations dedicated to providing experiences that put learners in charge of their journey and that foster a commitment to lifelong learning.

This transformational redesign will not be restricted to the classroom or campus. It will require a movement of educators, innovators, employers, philanthropists, parents, and others who are committed to helping learners of all ages discover, develop, and apply their talents.

We are particularly interested in fostering innovations that:

• Put learners in charge of their own educational journey;
• Increase access to a diverse array of learning opportunities and promote a lifelong learning mindset;
• Provide upskilling opportunities, particularly through alternative programs like certification, modern apprenticeships, and skilled trades;
• Incentivize competency-based learning;
• Develop the tools necessary to evaluate quality based on the outcomes desired by the individual, such as readiness and personal fulfillment

But that’s not all. We are open to hearing new ideas and investigating new solutions. If you want to turn around statistics like the ones listed above, and have an idea to do so, reach out to us to have a conversation.

Other funded focus areas include:
Criminal Justice, Economic Opportunity, Foreign Policy, Free Speech & Peace, Health Care, Immigration, Principled Entrepreneurship, Science of Liberty, and Technology & Innovation.

Solicitation limitations:

Among other items, the Foundation is not able to support:

• Percentage-based overheard costs - Overhead includes, but is not limited to, insufficiently specified and/or insufficiently detailed overhead costs (e.g., a requirement that a fixed percentage of a grant amount be dedicated to grant administration) and fringe benefits.
• Applied Research and Development
• Community development
• Infrastructure
• Cultural exchange programs
• Economic development
• Medical treatment

Library of Congress (LOC) Teaching with Primary Sources Regional Program (TPS)

Overview:

The Library of Congress awards grants under the Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) Regional program to school districts, universities, cultural institutions, library systems and other educational organizations who wish to incorporate TPS materials and methods into their existing education and professional development programs for pre and in-service teachers, librarians, media specialists and other K-12 educators.

The Program provides assistance and grants of up to $20,000 through its regional coordinators in the East, Midwest and West. The program promotes the widespread, sustained and effective use of primary sources from the Library of Congress within the educational community by increasing access to the TPS program for teachers who are not served by members of the TPS Educational Consortium.

Grant recipients may use TPS funding to meet a variety of programmatic needs, including:

• Delivering online or face-to-face TPS workshops
• Embedding TPS materials and content into broader professional development programs
• Revising undergraduate or graduate course syllabi or curricula to include a TPS focus

TPS Consortium members and regional grantees create professional development, curriculum and apps/online interactives designed to support educators’ ability to achieve some or all of the following goals.

Goal 1 - Justify conclusions about whether a source is primary or secondary depending upon the time or topic under study
Goal 2 - Describe examples of the benefits of teaching with primary sources
Goal 3- Analyze a primary source using Library of Congress tools
Goal 4 - Access teaching tools and primary sources from loc.gov/teachers
Goal 5 - Identify key considerations for selecting primary sources for instructional use (for example, student needs and interests, teaching goals, etc.)
Goal 6 - Access primary sources and teaching resources from loc.gov for instructional use
Goal 7 - Analyze primary sources in different formats
Goal 8 - Analyze a set of related primary sources in order to identify multiple perspectives
Goal 9 - Facilitate a primary source analysis using Library of Congress tools
Goal 10 - Demonstrate how primary sources can support at least one teaching strategy (for example, literacy, inquiry-based learning, historical thinking, etc.)
Goal 11 - Create a primary source-based activity that helps students engage in learning, develop critical thinking skills and construct knowledge

Applicants learn of granting decisions within six weeks of submitting proposals.

 Before applying for a grant, please review the website for your region and submit a Notice of Intent.

Solicitation limitations:

The Library will accept only one proposal from the same organizational department, which in this case means only one proposal from Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College.

Global Innovation Fund Grants

Overview:

Evidence is essential to innovation, and we are committed to promoting smart, evidence-led investing.

Research plays a central role: as a source of innovative ideas, and as a tool for assessing their impact, cost-effectiveness, and scalability. We are very much interested in supporting policy reforms that could improve the equity or efficiency of public sector performance. We support investments in public, private, and nonprofit activities, using all available financial instruments.

GIF construes “innovations” broadly, to include behavioral nudges and organizational innovations as well as hardware and software. Some examples include:

• The Behavioural Insight Team’s work on improving tax compliance.
• A training system for skills and entrepreneurship developed by Educate!, an Ugandan organization.
• Segovia’s system for facilitating cash transfers to vulnerable populations.
• Simprint’s rugged biometric identification system.
• Sparkmeter’s technologies to promote access to electricity.

Evidence is at the heart of GIF’s staged approach to investment. GIF takes well-informed risks in pursuit of high social benefits. To do so, we embed learning into each investment. We want to know things like: does this innovation improve poor people’s well-being? How? Under what conditions? By how much? Does it promote gender equality? Is it cost-effective? How sensitive is demand to income and price? The answers will guide decisions by GIF and others on whether and how to scale up the innovations.

Criteria for funding

Innovation: Research should promote real-world implementation of an innovative approach to an important development challenge. Innovations are things that make it easier, faster, less costly, or otherwise more feasible to achieve a development result than current practice. This includes testing to see if a result demonstrated in one context applies in others.

Potential impact: GIF is looking for innovations that make a big difference. These are innovations that, if scaled up or replicated, could make a substantial difference to millions of lives, or perhaps a transformative difference to hundreds of thousands. Target innovations have social benefits that far outweigh social costs.

Poverty focus: Target innovations are those that can improve the lives of those living at $5/day, and especially those subsisting on less than $2/day. This criterion is applied at the level of the beneficiary. So while GIF works mostly in low-income countries or provinces, it could consider, for instance, innovations that help impoverished slum-dwellers in a middle-income country.

Potential for and pathway to scale: GIF wants to support ideas that scale up.

If you have an innovative idea that you’d like to test for proof of concept, you can apply for a pilot grant (up to $230,000).

If you’re past the pilot stage and ready to rigorously test impact and cost-effectiveness, you can apply for a test and transition grant (up to $2.3 million).

For innovations that already have good supporting evidence and want to generate further learning as they expand and evolve, total funding can go up to $15 million.

If you’ve already evaluated an innovation and found it to be promising, let us know about it, and encourage the innovator to apply to GIF for scale-up.

Solicitation limitations:

Location: we accept applications working in any sector in any developing country.

No basic or laboratory research: GIF doesn’t support theoretical research or laboratory based research.

Carnegie Corporation of New York Education

Overview:

Our grantmaking aims to ensure that American public education prepares all students with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions they need to fully participate in democracy and thrive in the global economy.

Focus Areas:

• New Designs to Advance Learning: Our grantmaking funds school- and classroom-based innovations to better support student learning and holistic youth development, with an emphasis on meeting each student’s unique needs, ensuring deep mastery of content and skills, and improving academic outcomes.
• Pathways to Postsecondary Success: We invest to reimagine pathways to educational and economic opportunity for high school graduates. This includes initiatives to improve college access and completion, particularly for low-income and first-generation students, as well as efforts to better align K–12 learning, higher education, and careers.
• Leadership and Teaching to Advance Learning: We work to ensure that all students benefit from content-rich, standards-aligned instruction by funding efforts to strengthen teaching and school leadership, including the development of high-quality instructional materials and curriculum-based professional learning.
• Public Understanding: Our grantmaking aims to build a shared understanding about the changes needed to ensure that all students excel in school and life, including efforts to foster collaboration among families, educators, community leaders, and students as true partners in achieving that vision.
• Integration, Learning, and Innovation: Our grantmaking is designed to ensure that everyone invested in improving our nation’s schools works together more effectively to design and implement improvement strategies within complex systems. This includes efforts to reduce fragmentation, foster collaboration, and build cultures of continuous learning, as well as sharing lessons learned with the field.

Awards ranged from $25,000 to $1.5 million, with an average amount of $305,000.

Solicitation limitations:

Grants will not fund projects that support an individual, funds for local work, or support an after-school or pre-K program. 

Carnegie Corporation of New York Higher Education and Research in Africa

Overview:

To strengthen Africa’s higher education sector by improving the training, retention, and research productivity of academics in select countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

Carnegie Corporation of New York has been a major American philanthropic supporter of higher education in Africa for over two decades. Our grantmaking seeks to deepen and expand the continent’s advanced academic communities, networks, and universities, and promote policies that inform the growing higher education sector.

As African governments increasingly recognize the benefits of knowledge-based economies, research-active academics, whose training is relevant to the African context and who work in universities equipped to retain them, becomes essential. With a steady increase in both the number of universities and student enrollment, keeping pace with the growing need for academic staff is a daunting challenge. More skilled and knowledgeable university lecturers must be trained, and a number of universities must move from being largely undergraduate teaching institutions toward building robust research programs as training grounds for future lecturers. This transition requires new thinking about the provision of researcher development and retention on the continent.

With the aim of nurturing a vibrant corps of African academics working within dynamic and supportive university environments, our grantmaking is focused on:

• Early-career African academics with emphasis on their advancement and retention through support for universities and university networks that show potential for becoming strong regional centers of doctoral education and research
• African academic diaspora with emphasis on bridging African universities and the diaspora communities in ways that benefit research and training at African universities and create lasting, mutually beneficial relationships
• Higher education policies and practice with emphasis on generating and disseminating data-driven research and publications on Africa’s higher education sector and promoting policy dialogues on national priorities relevant to the sector

Letters of inquiry are accepted on a rolling basis; there are no deadlines. Applicants will be notified via email if their letter of inquiry is declined, or if they have been invited to submit a full proposal. This process usually takes four to six weeks. Only full proposals that have been invited will be considered.

Awards range from $95,000 to $2.6 million, with an average award of $1,029,000 .

Grants must benefit primarily higher education stakeholders living in a country that is part of the British Commonwealth. Projects must aim to strengthen research capacity of African scholars, scientists, and/or higher education institutions, or support higher education policy initiatives and/or research programs on higher education in Africa.

Solicitation limitations:

While anyone can apply, the sponsor notes that they do not "seek, and rarely fund, unsolicited grant applications." 

APS Foundation - Community Impact Grants

Overview:

The Power to Thrive
Encompassing all of our core program areas, Community Impact Grants respond to the diverse needs in each of the communities we serve across Arizona. Additional consideration is given to programs that serve under-resourced populations.

Core Program Areas:

• Education - We offer assistance or training for residents to obtain gainful employment, as well as for prevention and education programs that provide a solid foundation for children and youth.

• Environment Sustainability - Our grants assist environmental sustainability programs that promote stewardship and offer conservation education throughout the state. These programs seek unique solutions to preserve Arizona’s rich environmental legacy and prepare for tomorrow.

• Civic Development - A strong economy encourages more opportunities for Arizonans. We support Chambers of Commerce and economic development entities that foster business recruitment and retention, and sponsor events in cities and towns throughout our service territory. Programs that promote civil discourse, public safety and energy education are also welcome.

• Arts & Culture - We support organizations with a broad reach and that serve residents who might otherwise have limited access to participate, including performing arts, cultural festivals and youth outreach/education.

• Human Services - Our grants help residents obtain safe housing and ensure food stability, as well as providing opportunities for Arizona seniors to remain healthy and active.

Grant requests may be submitted any time throughout the year, but they must be received by October 15 to be considered for funding during the current calendar year. We respectfully ask that requests seeking event sponsorship be submitted at least 90 days prior to the event date. We are committed to reviewing all grant requests within 60 days of submission.

Solicitation limitations:

• Individuals or individual scholarships
• Organizations not located or providing services within the APS service territory
• Foundations or organizations which are grant-making entities that distribute funds to other nonprofit organization (pass through)
• Organizations whose primary mission is funding medical or scientific research
• Endowment, debt reduction, capital or building campaigns not part of established relationships

Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company Foundation Programs Promoting American Indian Culture and Self-Sufficiency

Overview:

The Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company Foundation provides grants to nonprofit organizations throughout the United States that support the preservation, promotion, and advancement of American Indian self-sufficiency and culture.

The Foundation’s charter mandate encompasses the preservation, promotion, and advancement of American Indian self-sufficiency and culture in the United States, including programs for:

• the development of American Indian entrepreneurism,
• facilitating American Indian education (particularly college, graduate, and post-graduate education), and
• the preservation and enhancement of American Indian culture.

The primary focus of the Foundation is to support specifically identified projects.

The Foundation Board meets on a quarterly basis – in March, June, September and December – to consider grant applications. Awarding of grants likewise takes place on a quarterly basis, in accordance with the decisions reached at the quarterly Foundation Board meetings. Therefore, fully completed grant applications must be received no later than the last day of the month preceding the meeting month (i.e., February 28, May 31, August 31 or November 30). When deadlines fall on a weekend, the following Monday will be the deadline. Applications received after the deadline will be held and considered in the next funding cycle.