The Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations (CFR) works with Brown faculty and administrators to foster support for the University’s mission of research and service.
The Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations (CFR) works with Brown faculty and administrators to foster support for the University’s mission of research and service.
Our team manages key institutional relationships and collaborates with corporations and foundations to advance research and other initiatives that make a positive impact on campus and in the world.
Members of Brown’s faculty and administration are invited to contact CFR for help in identifying and developing an approach to foundation and corporate funding prospects, developing proposals, coordinating campus visits, navigating the submission process, and stewarding awards.
In the face of recent abrupt shifts in federal funding for education research, including large-scale terminations of National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant awards, we have developed a rapid response bridge grant opportunity for impacted scholars, in collaboration with The Kapor Foundation, The William T. Grant Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This rapid response bridge funding opportunity is for scholars and teams whose grants have recently been cancelled by NSF. While it is impossible for private philanthropy to close the gap left by federal funders, we can provide modest grants to mitigate some of the impact on scholars, projects, and project teams. These $25,000 grants are for activities to address immediate needs following grant cancellations, including completing a wave of data collection, analyzing already collected data or writing, thoughtful project closure with community partners, or preparing grant proposals to continue the research. To be eligible for these grants, scholars must: (1) be working on research on STEM and education (including AI and CS, graduate education and MSIs, and scholarship that aims to reduce inequality), and (2) have had a recently terminated or cancelled grant from NSF. Where possible, we will prioritize early-career scholars.
The Evidence and Evaluation team aims to identify, evaluate, and scale evidence-based solutions targeting the nation’s most pressing social problems. One of the strongest tools in the evidence-building toolkit is the randomized controlled trial (RCT). While not applicable to all policy and program contexts, RCTs are often the strongest choice for evaluating social programs because they fairly compare results between a treatment group and a control group, making it clear whether the program or policy truly works. This strong evidence can be important for informing decision-makers and stakeholders to support effective programs. This Request for Proposals (RFP) aims to build the body of proven, effective policies, programs, and interventions by funding researchers to conduct rigorous RCTs across the spectrum of social policy. If you are thinking about other causal designs, you should check out our RFP focused on quasi-experimental designs here and if you are focused on criminal justice outcomes see a separate RFP here.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) is taking bold leaps to transform health in our lifetime and pave the way, together, to a future where health is no longer a privilege, but a right.
We have set three ambitious goals for our work:
Making progress toward those Generational Goals requires changing the systems that underpin our society. Currently, those systems create and uphold inequity by placing more value on some lives than others, based on race, class, and other factors. To create a more equitable future, we must identify and dismantle structural racism in our systems. We must create space for health practitioners, community leaders, and researchers to rethink the way our systems work, dream up new possibilities, and put one foot in the future to anticipate opportunities or roadblocks that future may bring.
Through our Ideas for an Equitable Future team, we support visionary thinkers—scientists, anthropologists, engineers, technologists, creatives, and others—who are imagining what the world might look like in the next 10 to 100 years.With our funding, they explore how those futures may unfold in ways that could slow down or speed up our collective efforts to dismantle structural racism and improve health equity.
By applying this future-facing lens, our grantees are uncovering how emerging social, cultural, scientific, technological, environmental, and economic trends and forces could shape the future of health for everyone. They are also discovering and experimenting with cutting-edge ideas that have the potential to tear down barriers to health and wellbeing and reinvent our systems so that they work better for us all.
