Call for Applications: Catalyze Challenge (Round 3) – United States

Deadline: 22-Sep-23

Applications are now open for round three of the Catalyze Challenge to jumpstart innovations in the field of career-connected learning.

Through the Catalyze Challenge, they award competitive grant funding to forward-looking organizations with groundbreaking solutions to challenges faced by learners and young adults ages 11-22 who are navigating career pathways.

Catalyze aims to serve the following populations through its grantmaking:

• Historically underserved groups
  • Catalyze seeks innovations that are intentionally designed for and made available to learners from historically underserved groups, including:
    • first-generation college students
    • immigrant, migrant, asylee, and refugee learners
    • learners of color
    • learners from low-income backgrounds
    • learners from underserved rural communities
    • LGBTQ+ students
    • multilingual learners
    • opportunity youth
    • students with disabilities
    • systems-involved learners (e.g., juvenile justice system and/or child welfare system)
• Opportunity youth & systems-involved learners
  • Catalyze has a particular interest in innovations that serve young people who are disconnected from school and work. Many “opportunity youth” are involved in the juvenile justice system, criminal justice system, or foster care system. This includes youth who are incarcerated, in foster care, unhoused, or exiting or having exited these systems.

What They’re Looking For?

• Round Three grant funding is designed to be flexible so that grantees can think big to nimbly develop, test, and learn from their groundbreaking innovations. Each innovation must focus on solving a specific problem faced by learners, employers, or others involved with career-connected learning. The most successful proposals will both describe this problem with precision and also make the case for why solving it would lead to positive learner outcomes and the overall advancement of career-connected learning.
• Round Three proposals must specifically address one of the two themes. Applicants must select one theme.
  • Theme 1: Career Exploration for young adolescents
    • Career exploration helps young people to envision and activate their journey through education into the workforce. Elements of career exploration include helping learners establish what they like to do, what they believe their skills and purpose to be, and where they feel they belong related to work. 1 Despite the importance of effective career exploration programs and supports, too many young people have lacked access to them.
    • Within Theme 1, the Catalyze Challenge seeks proposals for exploratory work to develop and pilot innovations that support young people aged 11-22 in building their identities, self-efficacy, and career readiness—specifically, innovations that build up learners’ awareness of and exposure to career paths, which, in turn, should strengthen young people’s belief in their capacity to work toward their educational and career goals. The Catalyze Challenge is looking for career exploration innovations that:
      • Provide guided career exploration for young people. This exploration can occur in school or outside of school, or directly to the learner.
      • Create opportunities for young people to develop agency and awareness to explore in-demand careers and learning pathways
      • Build young people’s skills, social capital, and self-efficacy so they can identify and pursue rewarding career outcomes
      • Help learners identify their unique strengths and sense of purpose to guide their lifelong career journeys
  • Theme 2: Activating Employer Partnerships
    • Employer partnerships are critical to the development and implementation of meaningful pathways to employment for young people. Pathways, or structured educational and work-based learning programs resulting in credentials and other valuable employer-facing signals, offer diverse options for learners to build and demonstrate career readiness skills, deepen their career identities, and develop social capital.
    • To be effective, pathway programs must actively incorporate employers into their design early and often, both to design effective curricula and course progressions and to provide work-based learning experiences. Despite the importance of employer partnerships in career-connected learning opportunities for youth, it is challenging for educators and employers to engage with one another.
    • Within Theme 2, Catalyze seeks proposals to develop and pilot innovations that activate employer partnerships in order to increase industry engagement in pathways and ultimately build career readiness for young people. Theme two proposals will be judged on their ability to build effective partnerships with employers and ultimately change behaviors of career-connected learning actors to connect young people with the world of work.
    • To that end, Catalyze Challenge is looking for innovations that:
      • Improve the definition of and accountability for high-quality pathways programming.
      • Change the behaviors of employer partners to enable impactful career-connected learning experiences
      • Develop partnerships with employers that increase opportunities for learners to explore careers pathways and proactively understand and tailor programs to meet workforce needs.
      • Create opportunities for learners to experience and make informed choices about in-demand career pathways through real-world projects and experiential learning opportunities faced by employers.
      • Help learners identify and develop their unique strengths and sense of purpose through employer-engaged career-connected learning experiences
      • Develop tools for employers to more readily manage, engage, and support career-connected learning opportunities with young people

Eligibility Requirements

• Applicants should ensure that their organization and proposed innovation meet the following eligibility requirements. Applications that do not meet these requirements will be removed from consideration at an early stage of the selection process.
• Please note: there are both overall and theme-specific eligibility requirements.
• Catalyze’s purpose is to jumpstart innovations in the field of career-connected learning. Round Three seeks proposals for exploratory work to develop and pilot career-connected learning innovations.
• Innovation means a solution to a problem faced by learners, employers, or others involved with career-connected learning, that yields better outcomes for end users than to the current solutions available. An innovation may be a novel approach, a new application of an existing approach, or a new business or delivery model.
• Catalyze aims to address persistent inequities in the U.S. education system.
• Learners are at the center of Catalzye’s mission, goals, and outcomes of interest. Catalyze grantees must plan for the Proposed innovations must plan to ultimately benefit learners aged 11-22.
• Round Three seeks proposals for exploratory work to develop and pilot career-connected learning innovations.
• Exploratory work involves “experimentation with new alternatives.” Such work is demonstrably new either to the organization that proposes the innovation or to the field of career-connected learning.
• Round Three grants are available to tax-exempt organizations and for-profit entities located in the U.S. All applicants must demonstrate that their proposal has a charitable purpose and benefits U.S. learners.
• Theme 1: Career Exploration for Young adolescents
  • Career exploration is a personal process. Innovations that support the formation of a learner’s career identity must aim to benefit those learners directly.
• Theme 2: Activating Employer Partnerships
  • To ensure that grantees can swiftly develop and pilot their innovation within the 6-12-month grant term, applicants must propose an engagement with at least one specific employer.

• For-Profit Entities
  • Catalyze grants are available to for-profit entities as well as tax-exempt organizations. Catalyze encourages proposals led by for-profit entities, particularly those at an early stage of development.
  • In order to receive philanthropic grant funding, for-profit entities must demonstrate that the primary purpose of the proposed work is charitable, and the work is not intended to result in a private benefit.

For more information, visit Catalyze.