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. With this year’s application opening on May 15, the Foundation recently hosted an informational webinar to discuss the program’s goals and background and provide an overview of eligibility details, required materials, and review criteria.
While we didn’t record the session, here are four takeaways to consider as you prepare your application:
1. Research funded in the Foundation’s use of research evidence focus area demonstrates that research is most likely to be used when it is:
- Responsive: Research evidence is timely, relevant to the users, and matches open policy windows.
- Routinized: Research evidence is integrated into existing routines or decision-making processes.
- Relational: Research is more likely to be used in the context of trusted relationships.
Research-practice partnerships are one way to produce research that is more likely to be both useful and used. Proposals should be clear about how the grant will strengthen the partnership between the university and non-profit organization or public agency.
2. The Institutional Challenge Grant consists of four goals:
- Partnership: The Foundation describes research-practice partnerships as long-term, mutually beneficial collaborations that promote the production and use of rigorous and relevant research. These partnerships should adopt a long-term view, persist beyond a single project, involve relationships between institutions, and benefit both parties.
- Research to reduce inequality: The partnership’s research agenda should identify an inequality in youth outcomes, specify what dimensions of inequality the study will address, examine programs, policies, and/or practices to reduce inequality, and explain how the research may improve the policy or practice partner’s work. We welcome research from a range of disciplines and methods, including descriptive studies that clarify mechanisms for reducing inequality and intervention studies that examine attempts to reduce inequality.
- Institutional change: This grant requires institutions to examine and redesign its policies and practices in ways that encourage sustained partnerships with public agencies or nonprofits, incentivize researcher to pursue community-engaged research, and improve the partnership skills of researchers.
- Build capacity to produce and use research: One of the barriers to using research to inform policy and practice at public agencies and non-profit organizations is the lack of capacity to do so. As such, the final goal of the grant is to enhance the capacity of both partners to collaborate on producing and using research evidence.
At the end of the grant period, we expect that partnerships have made strides in each of these areas, so please keep each these goals in mind as you develop your application.
3. In addition to the full proposal narrative, it is critical to produce a strong four-page structured abstract. During the review process, only two selection committee members review the full proposal. While these members will present the proposal during deliberations, the full committee is likely to have only read the structured abstract. As a result, the structured abstract should clearly describe the partnership’s research agenda, plan for institutional change, and capacity-building activities.
4. Mid-career fellows, a required component of the grant, conduct much of the partnership’s capacity-building work, including the research. Mid-career is defined as 8-20 years since the completion of a doctoral degree or residency for university fellows, and 8-20 years of cumulative experience for policy or practice fellows.
The grant provides funding for two years of a full-time equivalent fellowship. The grant also requires that the university provide one additional year of a full-time equivalent fellowship. There are several permutations by which a partnership can allocate this funding. For example:
- Appoint one research fellow for three years of the grant.
- Appoint two research fellows and one practice fellow for half-time appointments for three years of the grant.
Often, partnerships have at least one fellow from both the research and practice sides, though it is not a requirement.
In addition to our application guidance, we have developed a new resource to help applicants further consider how to allocate mid-career fellow funding.
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The 2026 deadline to submit an application for the Institutional Challenge Grant program is September 9. For more information on how to craft a strong application, please review our application guidance and applicant resources.
