Funding Opportunities

The Institutional Challenge Grant supports university-based research institutes, schools, and centers in building sustained research-practice partnerships with public agencies or nonprofit organizations in order to reduce inequality in youth outcomes. The grant requires that research institutions shift their policies and practices to value collaborative research. Institutions will also need to build the capacity of researchers to produce relevant work and the capacity of agency and nonprofit partners to use research. We welcome applications from partnerships in youth-serving areas such as education, justice, child welfare, foster care, mental health, immigration, and workforce development. We especially encourage proposals from teams with African American, Latinx, Native American, and Asian American members in leadership roles. The partnership leadership team includes the principal investigator from the research institution and the lead from the public agency or nonprofit organization. Policymakers and practitioners need rigorous research evidence that is relevant to their work. But too often the evidence produced by research institutions is shaped by the traditional values of the academy—the work is rigorous, but it speaks most clearly to the research community. This misalignment limits the usefulness, use, and impact of research in policy and practice, a challenge compounded by limited resources and capacity of the research and practice partners to engage in collaborative research. Research-practice partnerships—long-term, mutually beneficial collaborations that promote the production and use of rigorous and relevant research evidence—are a promising strategy for better aligning researchers, policymakers, and practitioners in their efforts to reduce inequality. Researchers who partner with practitioners or policymakers are better equipped to understand local contexts, address pressing questions, and produce informative and actionable findings. They also gain access to programmatic and/or policy insights and data that can facilitate rigorous and groundbreaking research to make headway on issues relevant to youth. Policymakers and practitioners, meanwhile, can more easily access, interpret, and use research evidence when they collaborate with researchers. They can also help define and shape research agendas. Partnerships, then, equip public agencies and nonprofit organizations with new knowledge and tools to better serve youth. Building sustained research-practice partnerships requires significant investments. It takes time to develop the trusted relationships that form the foundation of the partnership. Establishing the infrastructure to grow and sustain a partnership requires considerable resources. And for research-practice partnerships to thrive, they cannot be dependent on individuals alone, as turnover among individuals threatens partnerships’ sustainability. Although we suspect that research-practice partnerships are most robust when they are built at the institutional level, research produced by partnerships is not always valued by institutions. Research institutions’ policies and practices can inadvertently create disincentives to participating in research-practice partnerships. In turn, this can make it difficult to recruit experienced researchers to participate in research-practice partnerships or to sustain their involvement beyond a single project. The Institutional Challenge Grant is a direct response to these obstacles. The program challenges research institutions to remove barriers to partnerships’ success. Doing so involves the careful scrutiny and redesign of internal policies, practices, or incentives that limit the longevity of partnerships or discourage exceptional researchers from taking part. In turn, when partnerships are more productive, respected, and commonplace, communities of research, policy, and practice will be better aligned to reduce inequality in youth outcomes.