John Templeton Foundation Grant Program

Deadline: 16-Aug-24

The John Templeton Foundation is seeking applications to funds research and catalyzes conversations that inspire people with awe and wonder.

The work supported by the John Templeton Foundation crosses disciplinary, religious, and geographical boundaries. They fund work on subjects ranging from black holes and evolution to creativity, forgiveness, and free will. They also encourage civil, informed dialogue among scientists, philosophers, theologians, and the public at large.

They invest in bold ideas from contrarian thinkers — ideas that cross disciplinary boundaries and challenge conventional assumptions. And they fund innovative programs that engage the public with these ideas, in an effort to open minds, deepen understanding, and inspire curiosity.

Vision & Purpose

• Their vision is to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing.
• Their purpose is to enable people to create lives of purpose and meaning.

Funding Areas

• The John Templeton Foundation funds research and catalyzes conversations that inspire people with awe and wonder. The funding areas define their philanthropic priorities and advance their aspiration to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing. They welcome grant applications to support field-leading research and high impact public engagement programs in these areas.
  • Character Virtue Development
    • The Character Virtue Development area funds research to advance the science and practice of character, with a focus on moral, performance, civic, and intellectual virtues such as humility, gratitude, curiosity, diligence, and honesty. They believe these virtues enhance human flourishing by helping all of them to create lives of beneficial purpose focused on serving others.
    • Research they fund promises greater insight into the developmental science of virtues and character, including the identification of relevant precursors, correlates, and developmental trajectories, as well as the assessment of potential interindividual differences.
    • They also provide support to organizations such as schools, religious institutions, and community organizations to develop, implement, and evaluate applied and translational research on character and virtue.
    • Their current priorities include applied research and programmatic work on:
      • Intellectual Humility. Their plans for this priority include, but are not limited to, support for the following activities:
        • Investigating aids and impediments. They fund research that aims to discover more about the factors that enhance and inhibit intellectual humility, as well as research that identifies practices and interventions that foster such humility.
        • Developing Causal Models. They will support efforts aimed at developing, consolidating, and otherwise improving causal models of intellectual humility. They are interested in further understanding the causes and consequences of intellectual humility.
      • Love is critically important to advancing the John Templeton Foundation’s mission to support human flourishing. They seek to strengthen the conceptual and empirical work on love. They are especially interested in research that engages more than one academic discipline. They will prioritize research and programs that focus on how individuals can extend love beyond their close relationships (e.g., coworkers, neighbors, strangers, and even enemies).
      • Cultivating Character in the Digital Age. Advances in technology are rapidly changing the way children and adolescents learn and interact with others. How will these changes influence the development of character virtues? How can they strengthen character offline, to protect against potential negative interactions online? How might programs be able to leverage technology to promote character development? Can digital platforms be designed in a way that promote virtuous use? How can they promote the cultivation of positive norms and narratives in online contexts? To address these and related questions (and many more), they seek proposals from university partners, youth-serving organizations, faith-based institutions, tech-focused not-for-profits, and movement builders who are interested in helping youth thrive in the digital age.
  • Individual Freedom & Free Markets
    • The Individual Freedom & Free Markets Funding Area supports education, research, and outreach projects to promote individual freedom, free markets, free competition, and entrepreneurship. Grounded in the ideas of classical liberal political economy and with a commitment to the moral equality of all human beings, they seek and develop projects that aim to advance freedom, widespread prosperity, and human flourishing for all. Whether by academic research, instruction, public outreach, or supporting debate on public policy, their grants contribute toward making the world more just, more prosperous, and more conducive to human flourishing.
    • They welcome projects on any of the above topics, but they are especially interested in projects that could contribute to one of the following themes.
      • Projects advancing current research in and scholarly engagement with the classical liberal tradition (and fields related to political economy and Politics, Philosophy, & Economics), building on the work of figures such as Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek. They are especially interested in projects that bring together scholars from diverse disciplinary and ideological backgrounds and that engage with the strongest challenges to liberalism, such as those related to inequality and economic dynamism.
      • Projects that bring greater attention to the important role of basic political freedoms and explore how those rights are effectively maintained in pluralist societies. They seek to better understand the institutional environments most conducive to free and flourishing societies, and they welcome projects with a particular emphasis on the role of free expression, free press, religious liberty, and equality before the law.
      • Projects that explore market and enterprise-based solutions to poverty (domestically in the U.S. and internationally). They seek projects that help them better understand how markets can help the most vulnerable and marginalized communities, including projects that study entrepreneurship, identify and remove barriers to enterprise, strengthen property rights, improve the ease of doing business, and promote principled entrepreneurship.
  • Life Sciences
    • The Life Sciences portfolio supports research and engagement projects on such questions. They are particularly interested in applications that seek novel and fundamental insights into the meaning and significance of life processes, by which they can better understand humanity’s place within nature. They support experimental and theoretical work on a broad range of areas and topics, including origins of life, complexity, emergence, evolution, human development, and ecological health and interventions.
  • Mathematical & Physical Sciences
    • In their Mathematical and Physical Sciences funding area, they support research seeking to shed light on the fundamental concepts of physical reality. They also explore the interplay between these sciences and broader human experience.
      • They seek projects that will conduct rigorous scientific research in one or more of:
      • Cosmology
      • Quantum Foundations
      • Complexity and Emergence
    • They are especially interested in research projects that touch on more than one of these themes.
  • Public Engagement
    • Public Engagement funds a wide variety of grantees to create content, cultivate thought leadership, and develop campus programming. They seek to catalyze conversations that inspire awe and wonder because they want to enable people to live lives of meaning and purpose.
    • The Public Engagement department supports content projects that include video, audio, public events, and print media. In addition, they seek proposals that support the next generation of thought leaders, generate durable courses and programming at leading universities, and highlight the role of virtues like intellectual humility, gratitude, curiosity, and love in solving society’s most pressing problems.
  • Religion, Science, and Society
    • The Religion, Science, and Society funding area will support research on culture, religious traditions, and spirituality to advance their collective understanding of the ways in which religious and spiritual beliefs and practices affect human flourishing and to apply those insights to society in meaningful and practical ways.
    • This funding area will encourage research that engages substantively and critically with the sciences, including robust interdisciplinary collaborations in which philosophical or theological understanding informs the findings and methods of the sciences.
    • Supported work will draw from a range of fields and intellectual, religious, and spiritual traditions. Proposals should demonstrate exceptional promise to transform understanding at the frontiers of human knowledge or have high potential to meet critical methodological or conceptual challenges.

Duration

• The grant duration is often up to three years. In rare instances the Foundation may support a project for up to five years. The Foundation will not fund any project for more than five years.

Eligibility Criteria

• The Foundation has made grants to organizations from around the world.
• They fund charitable entities that operate inside and outside of the United States. On rare occasions, they may fund individuals and for-profit companies doing charitable work that is consistent with their tax-exempt status.

For more information, visit JTF.