Innovations from Academic Research That Positively Impact Global Health

New Grant Opportunity: Investing in Innovation Fund/DoE

Local educational agencies (LEAs) (including charter school LEAs) and nonprofit organizations working in collaboration with one or more LEAs or a consortium of schools.

The program will support efforts to bring to scale educational practices with significant evidence of success in improving student achievement and support the development, implementation, replication, and further evaluation of promising innovative practices. The program will not support the simple expansion of well-established and resourced programs.

New multi-sponsored opportunity encourages humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis, challenging scholars to develop international partnerships and explore vast digital resources, including electronic repositories of books, newspapers, and photographs to identify new opportunities for scholarship.

MDC's mission is to help young people be successful in school and in finding careers. MDC uses the following strategies to support its mission:

• increasing institutional capacity to better serve disadvantaged students and their communities
• reforming public policies and systems to increase the quality and availability of higher education
• promoting the critical link between postsecondary education and economic well-being for people and communities

Michael and Susan Dell established the foundation in 1999 with an endowment that has grown to more than $1 billion. The gift was inspired by their passion for supporting children’s causes as a way to make an even greater difference in a measurable way, particularly for those children living in urban poverty. Based in Austin, TX, the foundation initially focused on improving education and children’s health in Central Texas; but our mission soon expanded to reach children globally. To date, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation has committed almost $450 million to assist nonprofit organizations working in major urban communities in the United States and India. Our vision is to focus on opportunities with the greatest potential to directly and measurably transform the lives of children living in urban poverty.

The Office of Citizen Exchanges, ECA/PE/C, of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs announces an open competition for grants that support exchanges and build relationships between U.S. non-profit organizations and civil society and cultural groups in Africa, East Asia, Europe, the Near East, North Africa, South Central Asia and the Western Hemisphere. Pending availability of funds, it is anticipated that approximately $5,600,000 or more will be available to support this competition. ECA/PE/C expects to fund approximately 10-15 projects under this competition in FY 2009. U.S. public and non-profit organizations meeting the provisions described in Internal Revenue code section 26 USC 501(c)(3) may submit proposals that support the goals of The Professional Exchange Program. Projects should promote mutual understanding and partnerships between key professional and cultural groups in the United States and counterpart groups in other countries through multi-phased exchanges taking place over one to two years. Proposals should encourage citizen engagement in current issues and promote the development of democratic societies and institutions, with a view toward creating a more stable world. All programs should be two-way exchanges and involve participants from the U.S. and foreign countries.

Funding catagories: education, science, arts, and civic engagement

Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access grants to develop innovative techniques or programs that address national teaching and research needs in international education and foreign languages by using technologies to access, collect, organize, preserve, and widely disseminate information on world regions and countries other than the United States.

The Department of Health Policy at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (SPHHS) has received a $1.6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to study medical education in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The CHL Award honors unrecognized individuals who overcome daunting odds to improve the health and quality of life for underserved men, women and children in communities across the United States.

Selected list of foundation and government funding opportunities

2009 grantees

These grants support research and development projects that address major challenges in preserving or providing intellectual access to humanities resources. Applicants should define a specific problem, devise procedures and potential solutions, and evaluate findings. Successful proposals ought to have broad applicability to the humanities. NEH encourages applications that will explore new uses of digital technology in the humanities.

Eligible projects might:

* develop technical standards, best practices, and tools for preserving and creating access to humanities collections;
* explore more effective scientific and technical methods of preserving humanities collections;
* develop new procedures to create reference works; or
* improve the policies and practices of humanities research institutions affecting preservation and access on a national level.

Delaware Valley Grantmakers (DVG), the region’s forum for philanthropy, serves as a network, resource and voice to help philanthropy strengthen and improve the health and vitality of our communities.

See Resources for Grantseekers link.

Deadline: 12/12/08

The Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Fund for Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships in Jewish Studies encourages scholarly research, publication and teaching in the various disciplines of Jewish studies.

The Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships in Jewish Studies are made for one academic year and are given for the final stages of completing a dissertation, typically in the fifth year of study. Applicants should be completed all doctoral requirements, except for the completion of their thesis, and must show evidence of being able to complete their thesis within the fellowship year.

The Foundation currently awards five Fellowships at $16,000 per grant.

The aim of this program is to increase access to human knowledge and the fruits of human culture while developing a better framework for understanding the information economy. To date, the program has primarily encouraged digitizing material in the public domain; assuring public archiving, preservation and open access of this material; and fostering its availability to people everywhere through such technologies as books on demand. The technology now exists for universal access to the sum of all knowledge. The potential benefit to humanity is enormous, but it needs to be done in a truly open and non-exclusive basis, with the emphasis on the public good.

Scholarly Communications program focuses broadly on all stages in the life cycle of scholarly resources. The program complements fellowships and other kinds of support for research and teaching at research universities, independent research centers, libraries, and museums by promoting the cost-effective creation, dissemination, accessibility, and preservation of high-quality scholarly resources in humanistic studies broadly defined.

Grantmaking occurs principally in five main categories: new methods of creating scholarly resources, innovations in scholarly publication, cataloging and other forms of access, preservation, and research and evaluation. The Foundation is especially interested in developments that:

• Use forms of scholarly communications to stimulate collaborations among scholars and scholarly institutions in ways that substantially advance knowledge;
• Foster the means economically to sustain forms of scholarly communication; and
• Apply technology to forms of scholarly communications in order to improve quality, lower costs, speed up work, open new perspectives, or make work possible that would otherwise be difficult or impossible.

Research in Information Technology (RIT) is dedicated to supporting the thoughtful application of information technology to a wide range of scholarly purposes. The Foundation is interested in promoting the study of uses of digital technologies that can be applied to research and online and distance learning and teaching. The Foundation also supports investigations of new technical approaches to the archiving of textual and multimedia materials that require improved search and storage techniques and improvements in user-interfaces. The impact of information technology (and especially digitization) on scholarship, scholarly communication, and libraries is indisputable.

The Foundation seeks proposals related to technology that benefits one or more of its constituencies and/or multiple institutions, can realistically be developed by the grantee within the proposed timeframe and budget, provides a significant cost savings, is shareable, reliable, and objectively assessible, and has available IP.

Deadline: February 1, 2009

National Leadership Grants (NLG) support projects that have the potential to elevate museum and library practice.

Successful proposals will have national impact and generate results—new tools, research, models, services, practices, or alliances—that can be widely adapted or replicated to extend the benefit of federal investment. The Institute seeks to fund projects that have the following characteristics:

Strategic Impact—Proposals should address key needs and challenges that face libraries and museums. They should expand the boundaries within which libraries and museums operate, show the potential for far-reaching impact, and influence practice throughout the museum and/or library communities.

Innovation—Proposals should demonstrate a thorough understanding of current practice and knowledge about the project area, and show how the project will advance the state of the art of museum and library service.

Collaboration—While partners are not required in all NLG categories, the Institute has found that involving carefully chosen partners with complementary competencies and resources can create powerful synergies that extend project impact. Proposals should show understanding of the challenges of collaboration and propose means for addressing them.

Applications may be submitted in the following categories: Advancing Digital Resources, Research, Demonstration, and Library and Museum Collaboration Grants.

Collaborative Planning Grants are also available in any of the four categories to enable project teams from more than one institution to work together to plan a project for a National Leadership Grant

NHPRC Digitizing Historical Records

The Commission seeks proposals that use cost-effective methods to digitize nationally-significant historical record collections and make the digital versions freely available on the Internet. Project must make use of existing holdings of historical repositories and be made up of entire collections or series. The materials should already be available to the public at the archives and described so that projects can re-use existing information to create metadata for the digitized collection. Applicants must have the permission of all relevant copyright holders, where possible.

To make these projects as widely useful as possible for archives, historical repositories, and researchers, the applications will be evaluated on:

1. The national significance of the collections or records series to be digitized;
2. An effective work flow that repurposes existing descriptive material, rather than create new metadata about the records;
3. Reasonable costs and standards for the project as well as sustainable preservation plans for the resulting digital records;
4. Well-designed plans that evaluate the use of the digitized materials and the effectiveness of the methods employed in digitizing and displaying the materials.

A grant normally is for 1 to 3 years and up to $150,000. The Commission expects to make up to 3 grants in this category, for a total of up to $300,000. The Commission provides no more than 50 percent of the costs of Digitizing Historical Records projects.

The main goal of the Foundation’s higher education program in South Africa is to develop capacity in higher education by providing opportunities for individuals who were previously disadvantaged and individuals who have demonstrated a commitment to the previously disadvantaged.

Grants from the Foundation have supported regional library collaborations of universities and technikons (now universities of technology). All 21 higher education institutions and the National Library of South Africa have benefited from our support of five regional consortia. The Foundation also made grants to the South African Bibliographic Network (SABINET) to support library collaboration at the national level and to promote access to JSTOR, a scholarly journal archive (www.jstor.org). In addition, the Foundation has worked to improve access to the Internet for all of South African higher education through the Tertiary Education Network (www.tenet.ac.za).

Deadline: January 30, 2009 The Coming Up Taller Awards recognize and support outstanding community arts and humanities programs that celebrate the creativity of America's young people, provide them learning opportunities and chances to contribute to their communities. These awards focus national attention on exemplary programs currently fostering the creative and intellectual development of America's children and youth through education and practical experience in the arts and the humanities. Accompanied by a cash award, the Coming Up Taller Awards not only reward these projects with recognition, but also contribute significant support to their continued work.

Deadline: December 15

This program supports projects to develop faculty and library leaders, to recruit and educate the next generation of librarians, to conduct research on the library profession, and to support early career research on any area of library and information science by tenure-track, untenured faculty in graduate schools of library and information science. It also supports projects to attract high school and college students to consider careers in libraries, to build institutional capacity in graduate schools of library and information science, and to assist in the professional development of librarians and library staff.

Deadlines: 1/28/09 for projects starting 9/09; 8/26 for projects starting 4/10

Production grants support the preparation of a program for distribution. 

• offer cross-platform distribution of humanities content that combine radio or television programs with programs using emerging technologies, museum exhibitions, reading and discussion programs, and other formats that expand and enhance the program’s humanities content, deepen the audiences’ experience of the content, engage audiences in new ways, and expand the distribution of programs;
• include but are not limited to DVDs, Web sites, games, virtual environments, streaming, video on demand, and podcasts, as well as user-generated content;
• engage in simultaneous production of a broadcast program and interactive companion content in order to extend the educational experience of the program’s audience, use resources efficiently, and keep the humanities ideas at the center of the project as the broadcast program and the interactivity are designed;
• engage public audiences interactively in exploring humanities ideas and questions by using new ways to contextualize, interpret, and distribute content;
• result in large-scale, collaborative programs featuring multiple formats; and
• build new programs around previously funded NEH projects using complementary formats that will add new dimensions to the original project, and take advantage of new formats and technologies to reach audiences that were not served by the original project.

Deadlines: 1/28/09 for projects starting 9/09; 8/26/09 for projects starting 4/10

Grants for America’s Media Makers support media projects that explore significant events, figures, or developments in the humanities and offer creative and new approaches to humanities content.

• offer cross-platform distribution of humanities content that combine radio or television programs with programs using emerging technologies, museum exhibitions, reading and discussion programs, and other formats that expand and enhance the program’s humanities content, deepen the audiences’ experience of the content, engage audiences in new ways, and expand the distribution of programs;
• advance the role of cultural repositories in online teaching, learning, and research for public audiences, teachers, students, and scholars;
• include but are not limited to DVDs, Web sites, games, virtual environments, streaming, video on demand, and podcasts, as well as user-generated content;
• engage in simultaneous production of a broadcast program and interactive companion content in order to extend the educational experience of the program’s audience, use resources efficiently, and keep the humanities ideas at the center of the project as the broadcast program and the interactivity are designed;
• engage public audiences interactively in exploring humanities ideas and questions by using new ways to contextualize, interpret, and distribute content;
• result in large-scale, collaborative programs featuring multiple formats; and
• build new programs around previously funded NEH projects using complementary formats that will add new dimensions to the original project and take advantage of new formats and technologies to reach audiences that were not served by the original project.

Application Deadline: 1/28/09 for projects starting 9/09; 8/26/09 for projects starting 4/10

Grant funds can support all typical activities connected with project implementation and production, including:

• final exhibition design and fabrication, as well as crating and shipping;
• final consultation with scholars or other advisers;
• Web site development;
• completion of interactive program components;
• publication costs for complementary materials, including catalogues and curriculum guides;
• publicity expenses;
• staff training specifically for the project’s interpretive programs;
• development of teachers’ guides and curriculum materials;
• presentation and distribution of public programs and related materials; and
• audience evaluation.

Deadlines: 1/28/09 for projects starting 9/09; 8/26/09 for projects starting 4/10

Planning grants can be used to plan, refine, and develop the content and interpretive approach of a project and may be used for:

• meetings with scholars and other content advisers, program partners, and representatives of target audiences or other key personnel involved in the project;
• preliminary audience evaluation and beta testing of digital materials;
• travel to archives, collections, sites, or other resources;
• drafting of text for program or discussion guides, exhibition labels, brochures, publications, or other interpretive materials;
• preliminary design for any of the interpretive formats to be used;
• general preparation of the associated programs and materials for dissemination; and
• planning for training for docents, discussion coordinators, or other relevant interpretive leaders for the project.

Deadline: May 5, 2009 Challenge grants augment or establish endowments that support humanities activities in education, public programming, scholarly research, and preservation. Examples include:

• faculty and staff positions,
• fellowships,
• lecture or exhibition series,
• visiting scholars or consultants,
• publishing subventions,
• maintenance of facilities,
• faculty and staff development,
• acquisitions, and
• preservation or conservation programs.

Deadline: May 5, 2009 Challenge grants augment or establish endowments that support humanities activities in education, public programming, scholarly research, and preservation. Institutions may use the income from invested funds to meet ongoing humanities-related costs. Examples include:

• faculty and staff positions,
• fellowships,
• lecture or exhibition series,
• visiting scholars or consultants,
• publishing subventions,
• maintenance of facilities,
• faculty and staff development,
• acquisitions, and
• preservation or conservation programs.

Deadline: July 1, 2009 These grants support national or regional (multi-state) education and training programs on the care and management of, and the creation of intellectual access to, library, archival, and material culture collections.

• digitizing collections;
• arranging and describing archival and manuscript collections;
• cataloging collections of printed works, photographs, recorded sound, moving image, art, and material culture;
• preservation reformatting;
• deacidification of collections; and
• preserving and improving access to humanities resources in “born digital” form.

Deadline: January 30, 2009 This funding opportunity offers successful applicants a $2,500 grant from NEH for exhibition-related expenses and for exhibition programming.

Deadline: May 14, 2009 Preservation Assistance Grants help small and mid-sized institutions, such as libraries, museums, historical societies, archival repositories, ... and colleges and universities, improve their ability to preserve and care for their humanities collections. These may include special collections of books and journals, archives and manuscripts, prints and photographs, moving images, sound recordings, architectural and cartographic records, decorative and fine arts, textiles, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, furniture, and historical objects.

• General preservation assessments
• Consultations with professionals to address a specific preservation issue, need, or problem
• Purchase of storage furniture and preservation supplies
• Purchase of environmental monitoring equipment for humanities collections
• Education and Training

Deadline: February 18, 2009

The goals of the Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program are to:

• bring together humanities scholars and digital technology specialists from different disciplines to share ideas and methods that advance humanities research through the use of digital technologies;
• reflect on, interpret, and analyze new digital media, multimedia, and text-based computing technologies and integrate these into humanities research;
• prepare current and future generations of humanities scholars to design, develop, and use cyber-based tools and environments for research;
• devise new and creative uses for technology that offer valuable models that can be applied specifically to research in the humanities.

NEH strongly encourages applicants to develop proposals for multidisciplinary teams of co-applicants, partners, and collaborators that will offer the necessary range of intellectual, technical, and practical expertise. This program is designed to bring together humanities scholars, advanced graduate students, computer scientists, and others to learn new tools and technologies and to foster relationships for future collaborations in the humanities. Partners and collaborators may be drawn from the private and public sectors and include appropriate specialists from within and outside the United States.

The Hewlett Foundation Open Educational Resources Initiative seeks to use information technology to help equalize access to knowledge and educational opportunities across the world. The initiative targets educators, students and self-learners worldwide.

Supports high quality digitized educational materials offered freely for anyone with Internet access. Over 50 funded projects, including:

MIT OpenCourseWare, African Virtual University, Creative Commons, Widernet eGranary

See site/newsletter for more info

The Endangered Archives Programme is offering a number of grants every year to individual researchers world-wide to locate vulnerable archival collections, to arrange their transfer wherever possible to a suitable local archival home, and to deliver copies into the international research domain via the British Library.

The specific focus of this Programme is upon archives relating to the pre-industrial stages of a society's development, whether in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, or even Europe.

These grants will be the primary means by which Arcadia will contribute to the urgent task of identifying, preserving and making accessible such archival collections before they are lost to international scholarship forever.

British Library Endagered Archives award winners for 2008

List of awardees, project descriptions, and pdfs of successful proposals Open Educational Resources/Open Content grants.

Directory of foundations making grants in PA

NEH main grants page

News stories related to philanthropy.  See Guide for database of funding resources

Overview of NEH programs

The Doris Duke Clinical Interfaces Award Program seeks to catalyze activity at the interface of clinical and other research disciplines by:

• Supporting the formation of new collaborations and strengthening existing collaborations of outstanding scientists across disciplines;
• Demonstrating successful models for clinical research at the interface of multiple disciplines; and
• Supporting interdisciplinary and inter-institutional endeavors that go beyond the program project mindset.

Page related to funding opportunities for Judaic studies, maintained by Arthur Kiron

Center for Effective Philanthropy's publications

E-mail 2012 advisees

Advisor InTouch

Academic blog

• the Certified Local Government Grant Program
• the Keystone Historic Preservation Grant Program, and
• the Pennsylvania History and Museum Grant Program

Foundation Grants for Preservation in Libraries, Archives, and Museums [PDF: 20Mb / 118 p.] is a collaborative project of the Library of Congress and the Foundation Center. This publication lists 1,725 grants of $5,000 or more awarded by 474 foundations, from 2003 through 2007. It covers grants to public, academic, research, school, and special libraries, and to archives and museums for activities related to conservation and preservation. This publication includes:

• an introduction that explains the book's coverage, arrangement, entries, and how to research using the volume. Note: This pdf file contains hotlinks to free online grant writing tutorials and introductions to foundations offered by the Foundation Center as well as to some other widely used non-profit guidance on preservation grants found on the conservation online web site.
• a statistical analysis of grant funding in the area of preservation by foundation, recipient location, subject, recipient type (e.g., Library), grant size, and foundation generosity nationwide.
• state-by-state descriptions of projects funded in preservation nationwide including the foundation's name, limitations on giving, focus for giving, recipient(s), size of grant, and purpose of the grant described. Note: This section is hot linked in the pdf version directly to more detailed descriptions of the foundations.
• indexes by recipient, geographic area of the recipient, and subject. Note: If you do not find what you are looking for in the indices, use the find feature to search the text for your term.
• a list of all foundations that have donated to preservation with their contact information and limitations.

See web site for more info on "Areas of Excellence," which Alcoa funds:

Conservation & Sustainability

Demonstrating our commitment to conservation by educating young leaders, protecting our forests, promoting sound public policy research, and understanding the linkages between business and the environment.

Global Education & Workplace Skills

Broadening student and adult participation through education in technical areas central to Alcoa to ensure that a diverse cross-section of our communities is economically connected, workplace ready and globally competitive.

Business & Community Partnerships

Seeding notions of corporate citizenship community by community to strengthen the non-profit sector and to develop meaningful partnerships among non-profits, the private sector and local government.

We should totally get a grant to make a librarians institute along the lines of the Teacher's Institute so that we can provide support for local school librarians in the City.