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.
One of the goals of the program is to develop the capacity of partners on both sides to collaborate on producing and using research evidence. Because the success of the partnership and its research is dependent on the capacity of the partners to collaborate, the grant provides funds to support one full-time fellow (or two half-time fellows) per year for two years and requires the research institution to contribute a match of a mid-career research fellow for the equivalent of a one-year, full-time term.
To the extent that fellows will be instrumental in carrying out the partnership’s research agenda, applicants must consider a range of questions at the outset. What role will the fellows play in producing, interpreting, or using the partnership’s research? What learning objectives will the fellows pursue? How will they be recruited, selected, and trained? What skills and inclinations are most important for partnership work?
In this webinar Senior Program Officer Kim DuMont and President Adam Gamoran delve into these questions and more with Laura Tach and Juliana Garcia, research and practice fellows on the Foundation’s first-ever Institutional Challenge Grant, who discuss their work as part of the partnership between the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University and the Cornell Cooperative Extension-Tompkins County.
