The William T. Grant Foundation is inviting applicants for its William T. Grant Scholars Program to support career development for promising early-career researchers.
Donor Name: William T. Grant Foundation
State: All States
Counties: All Counties
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline: 07/06/2023
Size of the Grant: $350,000
Grant Duration: 5 years
Details:
The program funds five-year research and mentoring plans that significantly expand researchers’ expertise in new disciplines, methods, and content areas.
The Foundation supports research in two distinct focus areas:
- Reducing inequality in youth outcomes, and
- Improving the use of research evidence in decisions that affect young people.
Focus Areas
Reducing Inequality
In this focus area, they support studies that aim to build, test, or increase understanding of programs, policies, or practices to reduce inequality in the academic, social, behavioral, or economic outcomes of young people, especially on the basis of race, ethnicity, economic standing, language minority status, or immigrant origins.
Studies on reducing inequality should aim to build, test, or increase understanding of programs, policies, or practices to reduce inequality in youth outcomes. They welcome descriptive studies that clarify mechanisms for reducing inequality or elucidate how or why a specific program, policy, or practice operates to reduce inequality. They also welcome intervention studies that examine attempts to reduce inequality. In addition, they seek studies that improve the measurement of inequality in ways that can enhance the work of researchers, practitioners, or policymakers. The common thread across all of this work, however, is a distinct and explicit focus on reducing inequality—one that goes beyond describing the causes or consequences of unequal outcomes and, instead, identifies leverage points for reducing inequality.
Improving the Use of Research Evidence
In this focus area, they support research to identify, build, and test strategies to ensure that research evidence is used in ways that benefit youth. They are particularly interested in research on improving the use of research evidence by state and local decision makers, mid-level managers, and intermediaries.
Studies on improving the use of research evidence should identify, build, and test strategies to ensure that research evidence is used in ways that benefit youth. They welcome ideas from social scientists across a range of disciplines, fields, and methodologies that can advance their own disciplines and fields and reveal insights about ways to improve the production and use of research evidence. Measures also are needed to capture changes in the nature and degree of research use. They welcome investigations about research use in various systems, including justice, child welfare, mental health, and education. Research teams have drawn on existing conceptual and empirical work from political science, communication science, knowledge mobilization, implementation science, organizational psychology and other areas related to the use of research for improvement, impact, and change in research, policy, and practice institutions. Critical perspectives that inform studies’ research questions, methods, and interpretation of findings are also welcome. Broadening the theoretical perspectives used to study ways to improving the usefulness, use, and impact of research evidence may create a new frontier of important research.
Funding Information
Each Scholar receives exactly $350,000 over five years, including up to 7.5% indirect costs.
Eligible Organizations
- The Foundation makes grants only to tax-exempt organizations. They do not make grants to individuals.
- Organizations encourage proposals from organizations that are under-represented among grantee institutions, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-serving Institutions, Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), Alaska Native-Serving Institutions, Native Hawaiian-Serving Institutions, and Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs).
Eligible Applicants
- Applicants must be nominated by their institutions. Major divisions of an institution (e.g., College of Arts and Sciences, Medical School) may nominate only one applicant each year. In addition to the eligibility criteria below, deans and directors of those divisions should refer to the Selection Criteria to aid them in choosing their nominees. Applicants of any discipline are eligible.
- Applicants must have received their terminal degree within seven years of submitting their application. They calculate this by adding seven to the year the doctoral degree was conferred. In medicine, the seven-year maximum is dated from the completion of the first residency. The month in which the degree was conferred or residency completed does not matter for this calculation.
- Applicants must be employed in career-ladder positions. For many applicants, this means holding a tenure-track position in a university. Applicants in other types of organizations should be in positions in which there is a pathway to advancement in a research career at the organization and the organization is fiscally responsible for the applicant’s position. The award may not be used as a post-doctoral fellowship.
For more information, visit William T. Grant Scholars Program.
