Welcome to our blog!

Since 2009, the Rita Allen Foundation has undergone a great transformation.

Our expanded mission is to invest in transformative ideas in their earliest stages to leverage their growth and promote breakthrough solutions to significant problems.

As an emerging organization, we have built a more professional business model and have overhauled our mission, grants protocols, programs and standards. We have introduced and codified giving guidelines and a more formal process for grantees, and have now placed our applications and other grant materials online for greater transparency.

Our focus on a better structure is designed to ensure that the Rita Allen Foundation is applying the very best practices and using our grant investments to advance innovative projects that promise to address some of the world’s most pressing needs.

Our focus goes beyond short-term charity and the traditional foundation model of sending a check with best wishes for success. We are primed to stay involved over time with our grantees and invest in the future.

Beyond our internal reorganization and rejuvenation, we have formed exciting new partnerships with groups likewise engaged in seeking out change-makers who are reinventing the globe.

We are committed to advancing initiatives across various fields that ignite young leadership in the sciences and social innovation, promote civic literacy and build stronger communities.

We continue to emphasize and enhance the successful Rita Allen Foundation Scholars program.

Over the decades, our awards to Scholars have accelerated and transformed careers on the frontiers of biomedicine, fostering research to extend human knowledge and encourage the cutting-edge of the life sciences. We have promoted exciting research associated with above average risk and groundbreaking possibilities, often times providing crucial resources.

We are proud of our more than one hundred Scholars. Many are prominent researchers, whose discoveries have earned them the highest honors in their fields, including the Nobel Prize and memberships in the National Academy of Sciences.

As we move forward, the Rita Allen Foundation is eager to build on our history and successes by finding additional ways to motivate rising thought-leaders and doers in a variety of disciplines, intervening at the right time to maximize their impact to harness, share and magnify their innovative brilliance for the benefit of everyone.