- Rita Allen Foundation

All Grants

The below list reflects the Rita Allen Foundation's current and past grants to leverage the growth of transformative ideas in their earliest stages, going back to when our first staffed office was established following an influx of new resources. Read more about the Foundation's history here. In addition to the descriptions below, explore our website to learn more about our work, including highlights from the Rita Allen Foundation Scholars program and our investments to foster informed civic engagement, as well as what we're learning along the way.

2016

Young Leaders in Science and Social Innovation

All America Toolkit +
Ashoka $50,000

All America Toolkit

Ashoka began elevating and connecting social entrepreneurs around the world in 1980, and since 2001 has supported more than 200 Ashoka Fellows striving for social change in the United States. In an effort to build a more robust and diverse network of U.S.-based changemakers, Ashoka has launched the All America initiative. The project is seeking creative leaders from overlooked regions and communities around the country, seeking to “incorporate the rich ethnic, racial, geographical and gender diversity America offers into our social change landscape.” Ashoka has embarked on a virtual “road trip” to collect the stories of changemakers and share them with journalists and media outlets through a partnership with the Solutions Journalism Network, among other channels. The Rita Allen Foundation is supporting the production of a “Celebrate Your Change Story” toolkit, which will help leaders of all backgrounds spread their ideas and attract collaborators—and ultimately become more visible and more effective at solving complex problems in American society.
Top Artist-Innovators Exemplar List
Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors – Upstart Co-Lab $50,000
DataKind Labs Blueprint +
DataKind $75,000

DataKind Labs Blueprint

RELATED STORY: Imagining the Possibilities of Data Science

DataKind connects data scientists with social change organizations to develop data-driven strategies for tackling challenges in education, health, safety and other critical areas. The Rita Allen Foundation is supporting a new effort to share the lessons and broaden the impacts of DataKind Labs, a pioneering program where DataKind’s on-staff data scientists bring together multiple stakeholders on yearlong projects to tackle cross-sector challenges. The DataKind Labs Blueprint provides any organization with resources for adopting the DataKind Labs approach, outlining project-related processes from start to finish, and incorporating advice on best practices and pitfalls. The blueprint draws on examples from DataKind Labs’ inaugural project supporting Vision Zero in three U.S. cities to reduce traffic fatalities. DataKind is disseminating the blueprint widely and is actively engaging in discussions with groups working to learn from DataKind Labs’ experiences.
Rita Allen Foundation Scholars +
Class of 2016 and Continuing Scholars $2,850,000

Rita Allen Foundation Scholars

Since 1976, the Rita Allen Foundation has awarded millions of dollars in grants to early-career biomedical scholars. These grants allow them to establish labs and pursue research directions with above-average risk and promise. Learn more about the Rita Allen Foundation Scholars program.

Civic Literacy and Engagement

Building the Knowledge and Capacity of Funders Supporting Public Engagement with Evidence +
Media Impact Funders $125,000

Building the Knowledge and Capacity of Funders Supporting Public Engagement with Evidence

Media Impact Funders (MIF) is a network of philanthropists and foundations that fund public-interest media and technology projects, including documentary films, investigative reporting and social media campaigns. Through programs and communications, MIF enables funders to collaborate and increase the effectiveness of their work. Amid a rapidly changing media landscape, an epidemic of mis- and disinformation, and dwindling public trust in experts and traditional sources of information, there is a critical need to apply the latest research in developing public-interest media. The Rita Allen Foundation previously supported the creation of Assessing Impact of Media, an evolving collection of research, articles and tools to help grant makers evaluate and improve the projects they support. Now, MIF will expand on this model to curate and publicize emerging research on connecting audiences with science and other evidence-based topics—beginning with findings from The Public Face of Science project and the National Academies’ Committee on the Science of Science Communication. MIF will convene funders and share resources to help grant makers and media producers apply new knowledge about how to meaningfully engage audiences—with a focus on complex and contentious issues related to health, the environment, and other areas where understanding evidence is vital to making informed decisions.
First Draft News (a sponsored project of Meedan) +
$40,000

First Draft News (a sponsored project of Meedan)

First Draft News is a coalition of newsrooms, human rights organizations and social technology companies that work together to address challenges related to the use and verification of news content sourced from the social web. It produces guides and online tools, and conducts training to help journalists and others identify the origins and assess the authenticity of images, videos and other information shared by eyewitnesses. These resources enable newsrooms to publish content from the social web with confidence and transparency. Since its founding in June 2015, First Draft has grown from a group of nine founding organizations to a network of more than 100 global partners, including many major newspapers and broadcasters, as well as social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. First Draft has also launched an Academic Partner Network of social science and journalism schools from around the world, which will conduct and share research to make news verification more effective. In a time of heightened need for structures that promote trust and transparency in journalism, a planning grant from the Rita Allen Foundation is allowing First Draft News to establish robust nonprofit governance and staffing—thus increasing the organization’s capacity to secure independent funding and develop new collaborations, training and research.
Rita Allen Fellowship for Science Communication +
WGBH Educational Foundation $150,000

Rita Allen Fellowship for Science Communication

The WGBH Educational Foundation has been a leader in science storytelling for more than four decades, with programs that include the award-winning science documentary series NOVA. To identify ways to expand how and to whom science news and information are communicated, WGBH has joined with the Rita Allen Foundation to create the Rita Allen Fellowship for Science Communication. WGBH is recruiting an early to mid-career science communicator, who will spend 2018 working with NOVA and other WGBH and community-based science journalism programs, assessing challenges and developing tools and opportunities for engaging wider audiences, especially underserved communities, with science storytelling. The fellow will complement WGBH’s accessible science programming with experimental approaches, such as short-form video, podcasts or graphic novels, to inform and excite new audiences. Knowledge gained from the fellow’s projects will guide new approaches to science programming at WGBH, and will be shared with other groups working to advance science literacy.
Participation Lab
Participatory Budgeting Project $200,000
Innovative Science Programming +
National Public Radio $150,000

Innovative Science Programming

National Public Radio programs captivate and inform millions of listeners every day through a combination of rigorous journalism and riveting stories. With support from the Rita Allen Foundation, NPR is seeking to engage larger and younger audiences by expanding the reach and multimedia content of two popular science programs: Joe’s Big Idea (JBI) and Skunk Bear. JBI is a series produced by science correspondent Joe Palca, which provides a behind-the-scenes view of the people and processes involved in scientific research and innovation. JBI is developing its social media presence by recruiting a diverse cadre of young scientists to share their personal backgrounds and scientific interests with the JBI audience. JBI is also experimenting with new multimedia content, building on the success of its recent “Live Lab” videos on Facebook Live. Skunk Bear, NPR’s multimedia science blog founded in 2014, has attracted sizeable fan bases on Tumblr and YouTube. Now, Skunk Bear is building greater engagement and enhanced content by producing two seasons of videos responding to audience questions or topics in the news—with a focus on making content relevant and accessible for science classrooms. Recent episodes have tackled such questions as, “how old is your body really?” and “how is pencil lead made?”
Foundation Funding for U.S. Democracy
Foundation Center $50,000
We Will Campaign Toolkit +
Civic Nation $50,000

We Will Campaign Toolkit

Civic Nation was founded in 2015 as a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that creates campaigns to raise public awareness and forge pathways to action around a variety of challenges in American society. Working with the White House and other public and private partners, Civic Nation has launched campaigns on topics ranging from sexual assault prevention to support for young people navigating college and career plans. With funding from the Rita Allen Foundation, Civic Nation is developing an online toolkit for the We Will Campaign, which aims to draw more Americans in civic life by redefining civic engagement and strengthening the voices and capacities of local civic leaders. Civic Nation plans to conduct behavioral science research to inform the creation of the toolkit, which will help civic leaders channel their communities’ passions and ideas into concrete actions. The toolkit will reach audiences through partner media and civic tech organizations, and will interface with social media platforms to allow users to create communities around their ideas.
Engaging News Project +
Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life, The University of Texas at Austin $225,000

Engaging News Project

The Engaging News Project (ENP) evaluates ways that newsrooms can engage audiences by conducting trailblazing social science research—often in collaboration with news organizations—to understand how citizens interact with the news within the changing landscape of digital information. It then disseminates its findings to the broader journalism industry. The Rita Allen Foundation first supported ENP in 2014, allowing it to increase its capacity for research, partnerships and online resources, and to attract additional investments. In 2016 ENP produced 10 research reports, including one of the largest-ever surveys of online news commenters; refined its quiz and “engaging buttons” tools for newsrooms; and met with more than 100 working journalists to help them put these tools and research findings into practice. A new grant from the Rita Allen Foundation is enabling ENP to continue building awareness of its research, tools and strategies among the most influential and geographically diverse newsrooms.
Challenge Fund for Innovation in Journalism Education – Years Three and Four +
Online News Association $150,000

Challenge Fund for Innovation in Journalism Education – Years Three and Four

Building on a successful 2014 collaboration with the Online News Association and its funding partners, the Challenge Fund for Innovation in Journalism Education seeks to help journalism educators better prepare students to meet 21st-century information needs. The micro-grant contest encourages universities to create teams to experiment with new ways of providing news and information. Each group receives $35,000 for “live news experiments” that create opportunities for journalism schools to collaborate with newsrooms, researchers and other professionals to produce innovative local news for a digital audience. During the first cycle, the fund supported 22 projects, including: a series by the City University of New York and the New York Daily News that resulted in a federal investigation into the New York City Housing Authority on health conditions in public housing; and an account published by Georgia News Lab student reporters in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that uncovered millions of dollars of squandered federal HIV grant money by a county health program. The Challenge Fund is supported by a collaborative that includes the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund, Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, the Scripps Howard Foundation and the Rita Allen Foundation.
Science & Civics +
The Aspen Institute, Citizenship and American Identity Program $75,000

Science & Civics

RELATED STORY: A Few Reflections on the Challenges of Engaging Across Divisions

The Aspen Institute’s Citizenship and American Identity Program focuses on the challenge of sustaining strong citizenship in America and coherent national identity in an age of demographic flux and severe inequality. One of its projects, “What Every American Should Know,” explores how, in an age of increasing diversity and widening inequality, this country can cultivate a sense of shared destiny and common civic purpose. The Rita Allen Foundation’s support launched a new branch of this work, the Science & Civics initiative. The Science & Civics initiative is based on the premise that there is an interconnected gap in both civic literacy and scientific literacy in the United States—and that addressing them together is vital to cultivating a citizenry capable of informed self-government. The work aims to help scientists become more powerful citizens, and help to enable citizens to make sense of the world and complex problems more like scientists. At the initiative’s first convening, leading practitioners and communicators of civics and science came together to address two questions: what should every American citizen know about science, and what should every scientist know about civics? They identified a number of key challenges and opportunities, including the need for an infrastructure to help scientists connect with the needs of communities, as well as the need for citizens to understand the relationships between science and policy. The Institute has shared a blueprint for overcoming these challenges and other barriers to scientific and civic literacy, which will serve as a basis for public discussions and pilot projects in communities facing specific science-related issues.
Expanding the Reach of the COMPASS Message Box +
COMPASS $50,000

Expanding the Reach of the COMPASS Message Box

One longstanding challenge in science communication is distilling complex research into straightforward messages that are meaningful for different audiences. COMPASS is a nonprofit organization that has been coaching scientists on communication and policy engagement since 1999. A grant from the Rita Allen Foundation will enable COMPASS to expand the reach of its Message Box, a deceptively simple tool designed to help scientists effectively communicate their work to non-scientists. The COMPASS team will create a freely available workbook to guide any scientist through the process of using the Message Box. The Message Box provides a framework for organizing key information about a scientific topic, including the problems a research question seeks to address, the importance of those problems, potential solutions and the benefits of investigating those solutions. COMPASS has already used this approach to prepare thousands of researchers for engaging with school and community groups, journalists and policymakers. As a free online resource, the Message Box will reach many more scientists, including graduate-level trainees, increasing support for an emerging culture that encourages scientists to share their processes and discoveries beyond their labs.
Political TV Ad Archive +
Internet Archive $110,000

Political TV Ad Archive

RELATED STORY: The 20-Petabyte Idea

To help journalists and the public understand the origins and effects of political advertising, the Internet Archive created the Political TV Ad Archive, a freely available database of TV ads related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The Archive utilized the “Duplitron,” an open source audio fingerprinting tool, to track occurrences of ads backed by candidates, super PACs and other groups—all linked to fact-checks and to downloadable data on where and when ads were aired, sponsors, subjects and messages. The project used the same technology to track which clips TV news shows chose to air when reporting on the presidential debates. The project archived more than 2,000 unique ads; leading to more than 2 million views of ads, as well as logging more than 130 fact-checks of the ads and informing election reporting by major media outlets such as The Washington Post, Forbes, The Atlantic and Fox News. The Internet Archive is currently exploring new partnerships with experts in machine learning (artificial intelligence) to make such curated collections far less labor-intensive to create and analyze. By doing so, journalists, scholars and the public will have enhanced tools to establish the provenance of public statements, help assess the veracity of factual assertions, track the evolution of “talking points,” and provide deeper insight into the ow of ideas and the news.

The Rita Allen Foundation supported the initial development of the Archive’s technology through a pilot project, the Philly Political Media Watch Project, which collected ads aired in the Philadelphia region in the lead-up to the 2014 midterm election. In 2016 the Foundation helped to sponsor the primary election phase of the Political TV Ad Archive through the Knight News Challenge on Elections; a separate grant allowed the Archive to record general election advertising in eight battleground states, as well as improve its technology and extend its outreach and training to journalists, scholars and nonprofits.
The Public Face of Science +
American Academy of Arts and Sciences $225,000

The Public Face of Science

RELATED STORY: A Few Reflections on the Challenges of Engaging Across Divisions

Growing evidence suggests that the divergent views of scientists and the general public on key science and technology issues result not from lack of knowledge, but rather from differences of culture, beliefs and values. The Rita Allen Foundation is supporting the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as it explores the sources and implications of these differences through a new initiative, The Public Face of Science. The Academy is convening leading scientists, science journalists and science communication specialists to examine aspects of public trust and perception of the scientific process, as well as the role of media in shaping public attitudes. The project is also investigating how scientists have helped to inform public decision-making processes, and how these efforts might be made more effective in the future. For example, the Academy has surveyed nearly 400 of its members on their experiences serving as expert witnesses in the legal system. Along with these studies, the Academy will conduct a systematic examination of the challenges associated with communicating science to the public through the media, public relations offices at research institutions, and other intermediaries. The Public Face of Science will disseminate its findings through its website, public symposia, and radio and television programs produced in partnership with WGBH, Boston-based public broadcasting.
Development of an Application Program Interface to Leverage Data Projects +
ProPublica $50,000

Development of an Application Program Interface to Leverage Data Projects

ProPublica is an award-winning nonprofit investigative newsroom and an innovator in data journalism and multimedia content. The Rita Allen Foundation previously supported ProPublica’s efforts to expand its multimedia capabilities. Now, a new grant will enable ProPublica to create tools for mobile app developers to access its valuable health databases. These databases include Dollars for Docs, a log of payments to physicians from pharmaceutical and medical device companies; Treatment Tracker, a collection of information on Medicare reimbursements for various health services; and Surgeon Scorecard, a record of death and complication rates for eight elective procedures. Together, ProPublica’s health-related apps have been viewed nearly 25 million times on its website, empowering consumers to make informed decisions about their health care. The new data-access tools will extend the reach of these apps and create new potential revenue sources to support ProPublica’s public interest journalism. The development of these mobile tools will serve as a model for future work to expand access to ProPublica’s reporting on education, politics and other vital topics.
SeePolitical +
$50,000

SeePolitical

SeePolitical seeks to bring clarity to vital public policy issues by producing and distributing factual, unbiased, nonpartisan, noneditorial, entertaining animated videos that explain such topics as the Electoral College, as well as state and local ballot propositions. This content is an innovative, modern alternative to the text-based voter education guides produced by secretaries of state and other election officials. A grant from the Rita Allen Foundation will allow SeePolitical to build its capacity, producing new videos for its pilot program in preparation to expand. SeePolitical staff members currently teach a course at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, where students conduct original research on specific issues and create SeePolitical videos for distribution in English, Spanish and other languages. In 2016 SeePolitical will also partner with the University of Southern California to establish a program for designing civic education media at the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics.
Voter’s Edge +
MapLight $150,000

Voter’s Edge

MapLight, a nonpartisan research organization that tracks and publicizes information about money’s influence on politics, is working to make comprehensive, customized voting information more accessible to citizens. In 2014 MapLight piloted Voter’s Edge, an online tool that allows users to enter a home address and view personalized, nonpartisan information on candidates, ballot measures, campaign finance data and more. MapLight partnered with the League of Women Voters of California Education Fund to offer local voting information to Californians, and the Rita Allen Foundation supported the expansion of Voter’s Edge to include details on federal and state-level candidates in all 50 states. Now, funding from the Rita Allen Foundation is enabling MapLight to improve on the Voter’s Edge prototype by creating a standardized, replicable model that will eventually provide federal, state and local voting information for all jurisdictions in the United States. Assessing the effectiveness of Voter’s Edge during the 2016 general election will guide future efforts to expand the platform to cover federal, state and local voting information for every state.

Other

Fund for Shared Insight +
$750,000

Fund for Shared Insight

Fund for Shared Insight is a collaborative effort among the Rita Allen Foundation and other foundations to bring greater responsiveness and effectiveness to philanthropy. Launched in 2014 as a three-year, $20 million initiative by eight core funders, Shared Insight now includes 39 funders supporting 70 nonprofit organizations. Its grant making aims to increase foundation openness, and to improve feedback loops among foundations, nonprofits and the people they seek to help. In addition to the Listen for Good initiative, recent work sponsored by Shared Insight includes “Sharing What Matters: Foundation Transparency,” a report released in 2016 by the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP). To assess the meaning and current practice of transparency in philanthropy, CEP used survey data from 145 foundation CEOs and more than 15,000 grantees. Its analysis revealed that, while many foundations are openly sharing their grant-making processes, goals and strategies, there is room for improvement in sharing approaches to grant evaluation and lessons learned from grant making. Shared Insight is co-chaired by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Other founding funders include the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, The JPB Foundation, Liquidnet, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
Research on the Roles and Perspectives of Foundation Program Officers
Center for Effective Philanthropy $50,000
Listen for Good +
Fund for Shared Insight $60,000

Listen for Good

RELATED STORY: Finding the Questions that Matter

In 2016 the Fund for Shared Insight launched Listen for Good, a grant-making initiative aimed at exploring new ways for nonprofits to engage with the people they seek to help through high-quality feedback loops. Funders nominate nonprofits for Listen for Good grants, which are structured as co-funding arrangements between nominating funders and Shared Insight. This approach encourages funders to invest in building or advancing the feedback efforts of their grantees, recognizing that beneficiary feedback data may also serve to improve the practices of funding organizations. Shared Insight has awarded 46 grants of $60,000 each to customer-facing nonprofits in the United States—including organizations working to improve communities through health care, technology and the arts. Among the key goals of Listen for Good is to enable nonprofit organizations to apply the Net Promoter System, a simple feedback approach widely used in the for-profit sector to assess and respond to customer experience.

In addition to its overall sponsorship of Listen for Good, the Rita Allen Foundation is co-funding a grant to the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (Public Lab), which builds open-source hardware and software that enable scientists and community members to collaboratively investigate local environmental health issues. As Public Lab partners with science and environmental education specialists to develop a comprehensive evaluation framework for community science projects, a grant from Listen for Good is helping the organization examine how its diverse constituents define success—which may mean bringing people together to tackle questions of common concern, or working toward changes in laws and regulations.
Nonprofit Quarterly
$50,000