Deadline: 4-Nov-22
Is your organization working with others in your community to help adolescents build relationships, explore their identities, and prepare for college or careers? Do you work with young people who struggle with transitions to adulthood because of structural factors such as poverty and homelessness? Are you using innovative strategies to offer learning and development opportunities beyond the traditional classroom? If so, The Wallace Foundation would love to hear from you and learn more about your important work.
Goals
Wallace has three goals for this effort:
- To support innovative partnerships that serve youth and strengthen the communities in which they reside;
- To learn about those partnerships’ strengths, challenges, and opportunities for improvement; and
- To use what they learn during this period – which they are referring to as an exploratory phase – to inform the design of future Wallace initiatives.
Funding Information
Each group of organizations selected will receive grants averaging $200,000 for a year of work, as well as access to other supports such as peer learning and technical assistance.
What Participation Entails?
- This one-year, exploratory phase is intended to support and strengthen collaborative strategies communities are using to promote youth development, help Wallace learn more about those strategies and inform Wallace’s future efforts in the area. In particular, they are looking to fund projects over the course of one year that are an element of a broader strategy or effort that would play out over a longer period of time.
- Participants will use Wallace support to implement or improve their work, reflect on their progress and identify the resources they need to meet their objectives. Independent researchers, youth development experts and Wallace staff will study the work to help us learn more about the kinds of partnerships that exist, the goals they hope to achieve, the strategies they employ to achieve them, the barriers they confront and the supports they need to make progress. Researchers will share their findings with Wallace and the partnerships selected to participate in the exploratory phase.
- They intend to use lessons they learn from this exploratory phase to help design their next initiative in learning and enrichment, which will likely span five to seven years. That initiative will, they hope, produce further insights and evidence that could benefit the broader youth development sector.
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They therefore ask grantees to commit to:
- One year of participation, from approximately March 2023 to March 2024, by a team that includes representatives from each of the organizations partnering to implement the funded strategy;
- Work with a research team that will study the work by convening focus groups, conducting interviews and/or administering surveys; and
- Host researchers, consultants and/or Wallace staffers for site visits.
Eligibility Criteria
They are looking for partnerships among organizations that:
- Work at the systems-level, i.e. they work across sites or programs in a cross-sector partnership that includes public or private entities such as county or municipal offices, business organizations or coalitions, non-profit organizations, neighborhood development corporations, higher education institutions, community organizers and school districts;
- Have an existing or emergent strategy focused on adolescents, which they define roughly as youth aged 11 to 19, especially those who face systemic or structural challenges, such as poverty, homelessness and physical, mental or behavioral disabilities or others;
- Focus on learning and development opportunities for youth beyond the traditional classroom;
- Are already in place, not created for the purpose of applying for this grant opportunity; and
- Work at the local level (e.g., neighborhood, town, city or county) in the United States, District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands or Guåhan (Guam).
For more information, visit Wallace Foundation.
For more information, visit https://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/pages/funding-opportunity-cross-sector-partnerships-focused-on-adolescents.aspx