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The William T. Grant and Spencer Foundations have awarded a Rapid Response Research grant to the University of California, Berkeley in partnership with James Burch, policy director of the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP) and a member of the City of Oakland’s Reimaginging Public Safety Task Force. The R3 program supports reviews of existing research, conducted […]

The Foundation occasionally supplements its support for empirical research with targeted capacity-building grants. One new award, approved at the Foundation’s spring Board meeting, will support consultations for applicants and grantees and a biennial workshop for grantees to build their capacity to conduct mixed-methods research that integrates qualitative and quantitative methods. William T. Grant Foundation Mixed […]

We want to know what it takes to get research evidence used and what happens when it is used.

We are proud to announce five new research grants, including four to support studies on reducing inequality in youth outcomes and one to support a study on improving the use of research evidence. Approved at the Foundation’s March Board meeting, these grants will build theory and empirical evidence in our two focus areas. Sign up […]

President’s Note Race is a key dimension of inequality in youth outcomes. For researchers who seek to study ways to reduce racial inequality, the starting point is a well-conceived research question grounded in a rich understanding of what racial categories mean and how racism is instantiated in systems, policies, institutions, and the like. With a […]

The Institutional Challenge Grant encourages university-based research institutes, schools, and centers to build sustained research-practice partnerships with public agencies or nonprofit organizations in order to reduce inequality in youth outcomes. To do so, research institutions will need to shift their policies and practices to value collaborative research. They will also need to build the capacity […]

Social scientists are producing thousands of studies relevant to policy decisions, and policymakers are making thousands of decisions that would benefit from research evidence. Policymakers prefer to hear directly from researchers about their findings (Scott, 2021), so why is it that a disconnect often exists? What does the science say about how researchers could more […]

We are pleased to announce the newest class of William T. Grant Scholars. Launched in 1982, the Scholars Program supports the professional development of promising researchers in the social, behavioral, and health sciences who have received their terminal degrees within the past seven years. To date, the program has sponsored more than 197 talented researchers. […]

During the COVID pandemic, policy debates about how to address the crisis have often been portrayed as scientific knowledge in competition with political rhetoric for public attention. Yet even in this unprecedented case, rarely has evidence of only a single type been used in policy arguments. Rather scientific research about virus transmission and vaccines has […]

The newest grants, amounting to nearly $2,000,000, are being awarded to Johns Hopkins University, Northeastern University, and the University of California Santa Cruz. These institutions will work in partnership with local nonprofits or public agencies to address challenges such as youth suicide, youth employment, and educational inequality.

The Foundation hopes to support more solution-oriented research that not only richly theorizes anti-Asian racism but also identifies ways to counter racism, xenophobia, and other forms of oppression.

LGBTQ youth face disproportionate levels of harassment, bullying, depression, and substance abuse compared to non-LBGTQ peers. What is the current evidence on ways to reduce these inequalities and how might new research inform how grantmakers and service providers respond? In this webinar, held on March 17, 2021, we discuss the Foundation’s interest in supporting studies […]

Many of us may have hoped that the change in administration in Washington, DC, would have lessened the pervasive climate of hostility and xenophobia that we have experienced in the United States over the past four years. After all, a change in leadership is often regarded as prelude to culture change. Tragically, White supremacy and […]

Hosted by the Foundation and the Forum for Youth Investment on March 11, 2021, this webinar focuses on how concepts such as the perceived objective nature of evidence, the positionality of the researcher in policymaking, and the role of power and politics in the use of research evidence are critical to understand as we study […]

Can a model that supports collaboration between the scientific and policy communities improve the use of research evidence in child and family policymaking?