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.

Smith Richardson Foundation Domestic Public Policy Program

Overview:

The Domestic Public Policy Program supports projects that will help the public and policy makers understand and address critical challenges facing the United States. To that end, the Foundation supports research on and evaluation of existing public policies and programs, as well as projects that inject new ideas into public debates.

The Foundation believes that policy makers face a series of challenges that need to be met if the United States is going to continue to prosper and provide opportunity to all of its citizens. Even as public finances begin to recover in the wake of the financial crisis and recession, officials are confronting difficult choices that will have to be made in order to restore long-term fiscal balances while maintaining essential public services. These choices will include decisions regarding how best to raise revenues while also creating an environment conducive to economic growth. Policy makers are also looking for strategies that can deliver key public services, such as education and criminal justice, in an effective and efficient manner. There is also a need to develop strategies to improve the long-term growth rate of the U.S. economy and strengthen economic opportunity. Doing so will require a combination of more effective strategies to develop human capital and establishing an economic climate hospitable to entrepreneurship and growth.

To meet these broad objectives, the Foundation has developed a number of grant making portfolios. A group of grants is focused on the challenges of identifying mechanisms that can inform thinking on fiscal practices at the national, state, and municipal levels. In terms of human capital development, the Foundation has been supporting work to identify how schools can become more productive by, for example, increasing the quality of the teacher workforce or adopting more effective curricula. Because success in the contemporary economy requires individuals to acquire education and training beyond high school, the Foundation is building a portfolio of projects on post-secondary education. Finally, the Foundation is supporting work on the criminal justice system that will examine whether costs can be lowered while still protecting public safety.

The Smith Richardson Foundation has a rigorous proposal review process. The first step in the process is the submission of a concept paper. Concept papers should not exceed six pages (the one-page data sheet does not count toward the page limit). Please consult our concept paper template before making a submission.

If the staff determines that a project warrants further consideration under the Foundation’s guidelines, an applicant will be asked to submit a full proposal that conforms to the proposal template provided by the Foundation, to include a one-year budget or two-year budget.

The Foundation has a two-stage application process. Initial inquiries should be submitted by mail in the form of the concept paper. Foundation staff will review the concept paper and, if the project is determined to be a good candidate for a grant, will ask an applicant to prepare a full-length proposal. Concept papers are accepted any time. A concept paper should be between three and six pages in length. It should begin with a one-page data sheet listing all the essential information pertinent to a grant request, including the project title, an estimated grant amount, project start and end dates, and the name and contact information for the principal investigator. Concept paper submissions should adhere to the requirements described in the concept paper template.

Previous award budgets have ranged from $40,000 - $200,000.

Arnold Ventures Randomized Controlled Trials to Evaluate Social Programs Whose Delivery Will Be Funded by Government or Other Entities

Overview:

Arnold Ventures’ (AV) Evidence-Based Policy team invites grant applications to conduct randomized
controlled trials (RCTs) of social programs in any area of U.S. policy in which:
(i) AV will fund the RCT, and government or another entity will fund the program’s delivery; and
(ii) The RCT meets the additional selection criteria set out below.

Our main goal in funding such RCTs is to build the body of programs rigorously shown to produce sizable, sustained effects on important life outcomes. We recognize how challenging this is: Surprisingly few programs are found to produce the hoped-for improvements in participants’ lives when evaluated in a well-conducted RCT. This Request for Proposals seeks to optimize the chances of success by prioritizing RCTs of programs with highly-promising prior evidence or other compelling policy reasons for a rigorous evaluation.

IMPORTANCE: Is the applicant proposing to evaluate a program –

• That is backed by highly-promising prior evidence, suggesting it could produce sizable impacts on outcomes of recognized policy importance – such as educational achievement, workforce earnings, criminal arrests, hospitalizations, child maltreatment, and government spending. For example, we specifically encourage applications seeking to replicate findings from prior rigorous evaluations that are especially promising but not yet conclusive—e.g., due to only short-term follow-up, a single-site study design, or well-matched comparison groups but not randomization. (Please provide full citations to the relevant prior studies as an attachment to the letter of interest.) As a threshold condition for “highly promising” evidence, applicants should show that the program can be or (preferably) has been successfully delivered under real-world implementation conditions, since effective implementation is usually necessary for a program to produce meaningful impacts.

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• For which there are other compelling policy reasons to evaluate its effectiveness – e.g., it is, or soon will be, widely implemented with significant taxpayer investment, and its impact on its targeted outcomes is currently unknown. Please note that, to meet this criterion, it is not sufficient to establish that the program seeks to address an important problem, or that the study will fill a gap in the research or test a theory. Applicants must also present a compelling policy reason, as described above, to evaluate the specific program.

Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis; there is no deadline.

We recognize the need to expand and diversify the pool of researchers with RCT experience. Thus we strongly encourage researchers who are new to RCTs, including those from groups historically underrepresented in the research community – such as researchers of color and women – to participate in this funding opportunity. We therefore want to clarify that such individuals who do not meet the experienced researcher” criterion themselves may still serve as a study’s lead researcher as long as they partner with a colleague who does meet the criterion and will play a key substantive role in the study. (Prospective applicants are welcome to contact us for assistance in addressing this criterion; see contact information in section IV below.)

Solicitation limitations:

We ask applicants first to submit a letter of interest (maximum three pages). To address this criterion, we request that applicants submit at least one, and not more than two, reports from such prior RCTs (please send the full study reports as email attachments to the letter of interest). Reviewers will rely primarily on these reports in assessing this selection criterion.

Arnold Ventures Randomized Controlled Trials of Criminal Justice Programs and Practices

Overview:

Arnold Ventures (AV) is a nonpartisan philanthropy whose core mission is to invest in evidence-based solutions that maximize opportunity and minimize injustice. This Request for Proposals—a joint effort of AV’s Criminal Justice and Evidence-Based Policy initiatives—seeks grant applications to conduct randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of criminal justice programs and practices (“interventions”) in the United States that fall into one of three tiers:

1. The intervention is backed by promising prior evidence suggesting it could produce sizable impacts on important criminal justice outcomes (e.g., prevent violence, reduce recidivism, minimize injustice, improve health/employment of persons formerly involved in the justice system);
2. The intervention is widely adopted in practice, but has not yet been rigorously evaluated and its impacts on key criminal justice outcomes are thus largely unknown; or
3. The intervention is growing in use and likely to become widely adopted, but has not yet been rigorously evaluated.

While this Request for Proposals focuses on RCTs, we will also consider certain rigorous quasiexperimental designs when random assignment is not feasible, as discussed under “study design” below. Submissions are welcome in all areas of criminal justice; we especially encourage those that align with a priority area of the Criminal Justice initiative (i.e., policing, pretrial justice, community supervision, prisons, and reintegration) or with the Evidence-Based Policy initiative’s focus on areas where prior studies have identified a number of promising interventions (e.g., youth crime prevention).

Our ultimate goal in this effort is to build credible evidence about “what works” to improve criminal justice outcomes and, in particular, to grow the number of criminal justice interventions rigorously shown to produce important improvements in people’s lives. Few such proven-effective interventions currently exist, and until they do, our nation will lack critical knowledge needed to move the needle on crime, injustice, and other key criminal justice outcomes.

What To Expect in the Grant Agreement: We will ask awardees, as a condition of their award, to –

• Pre-register the study on the Open Science Framework (OSF) website and, prior to commencement of the study, upload a copy of the research and analysis plan described in their proposal.
• Provide us with brief phone or email updates on the study’s progress on a periodic basis, and before making any key decisions that could materially affect the study’s design or implementation.
• Submit concise reports on the impact findings at appropriate intervals. These reports should make it easy for readers to see the study’s main results and gauge their credibility (e.g., by showing the similarity of the treatment and control groups in pre-program characteristics, the amount of sample attrition, and the statistical significance of the impact findings).

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• Make their datasets and related materials (e.g.,survey instruments, code used to clean and analyze datasets) publicly available on the OSF site. We ask applicants to do this within one year of the last data collection, and only to the extent allowed under any confidentiality/privacy protections.

Solicitation limitations:

Letter of Intent required.

The Policy permits institutions of higher education, including community colleges, to receive an indirect cost rate of 15 percent (15%) of total direct project costs; all other organizations (e.g., non-profit, governmental, for-profit, etc.) may receive an indirect cost rate of 20 percent (20%) of total direct project costs.