Zamir Bradford, Lynne Le, Jamila M. Porter, Kay Schaffer,de Beaumont Foundation
Megan Collado and Rishika Desai, AcademyHealth
Jamae Morris, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Every step of the grant application process—from initial outreach to final award notification—provides opportunities for funders to either reinforce inequities or dismantle them. The grant application process is often the first barrier that organizations encounter when seeking funding. If designed without an intentional focus on equity, the application process can advantage well-resourced organizations, while disadvantaging equally or better qualified organizations that have fewer resources.
Equity starts with a universal goal: a fair and just outcome that everyone deserves. Funders that seek to advance the work of equity—providing people with resources and supports according to their needs so that they can all achieve universal goals—must start by entering equity in the grant application process.
Two grant initiatives, funded in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, sought to design and implement application processes that explicitly centered on equity. The Community Research for Health Equity (CRHE) program, managed by the health services research professional association AcademyHealth, supports community-led research projects that seek to elevate community voices in health system transformation. The Modernized Anti-racist Data Ecosystems (MADE) for Health Justice initiative—created and administered by the de Beaumont Foundation, a public health-focused philanthropy—is partnering with community members, local governments, community power-building organizations, and advocates to transform civic data by building local data ecosystems that center principles of anti-racism, equity, justice, and community power.
Although each initiative was developed at different times, by different institutions, and with different goals, they are connected in their efforts to upend decades-long power imbalances that have allowed dominant institutions—including governments, universities, health systems, and philanthropies—to solely determine how data and research are generated, framed as credible, and used to drive decisionmaking.
From the very beginning, CRHE and MADE designed their application processes to embrace the three requirements for equity coined by epidemiologist and scholar, Camara Jones. Adapted for a grant application process, these requirements include valuing all potential applicants equally, recognizing and rectifying historic injustices within grant application processes, and providing resources to applicants according to need. The decision to explicitly center equity in the application process was a natural evolution from the core values held by CRHE and MADE, which include fostering trustworthiness, uplifting community leadership and lived experience, and prioritizing co-creation and collaboration.
These core values were used to shape grant application processes that were equitable in both design and implementation. While MADE utilized a three-phase application process that took place over the course of a year, and CRHE used a shorter, single-phase application process, both used equity-centered approaches to ensure they could identify and support well-qualified applicants. Both MADE and CRHE explicitly centered equity into their application processes by: (1) Designing the application process with intention; (2) Building significant time into the application process; and (3) Providing supports to applicants according to their needs.
1. Design with Intention
Both CRHE and MADE required that eligible applicants be community-based nonprofit organizations—a decision that intentionally shifted power to communities by ensuring they had decision-making authority over grant applications and, if successful, awards of funding. Staff from community-based organizations had to be Principal Investigators of projects proposed for CRHE funding. To apply for MADE for Health Justice, organizations had to be nonprofit organizations that had an organizational mission or strategic priorities focused on serving communities of color and addressing structural racism, equity, and justice. Eligible applicants for MADE also had to engage in community power building activities, such as grassroots advocacy and community organizing.
Designing with a focus on intentionality and equity also included the application review and award selection processes. Both CRHE and MADE’s review processes involved multiple application reviewers with diverse experiences and backgrounds and application review criteria that reflected the complexity of the grant opportunity. CRHE purposefully engaged reviewers whose lived experiences aligned with priority populations that were included in proposed research studies. MADE’s multi-phased application approach and review process involved qualitative assessments of applicants’ programmatic strategy, informatics capacity, and authenticity to do work that involved confronting structural racism. Together, these approaches helped CRHE and MADE identify stronger applicants that were genuinely invested in and had proven potential to do the complex work required of their grant opportunities.
2. Build Significant Time into the Application Process
It is critical that significant time be woven into the application process to ensure it is fair, thorough, and ultimately successful. When funders don’t provide adequate time for the application process or misuse it, they can generate a sense of false urgency that may push applicants to submit proposals that are rushed and uncompetitive. Moreover, by failing to build enough time into the application process, funders can miss out on strong potential applicants simply because they didn’t have sufficient time to learn about the opportunity and apply.
Given that community-based nonprofit organizations often face immense time and capacity constraints, the MADE application process included a time cushion of several weeks that had been purposefully built into the timeline. This included time for applicants to learn about the grant opportunity and apply shortly after the call for applications opened. Because applicants for MADE had to demonstrate they had support from a coalition of partners, including multiple local government agencies and others, the application timeline was constructed to provide applicants with time to connect with multiple partners, work through organizational bureaucracies, and collaboratively plan a competitive application.
Applicants for MADE were also told up front that requests for extensions were welcome in advance of the application due date and would be considered on a case-by-case basis. Similarly, CRHE provided extensions to applicants to provide flexibility for applicants who were coping with devastation from a hurricane that occurred near the application due date.
Transparency also supported timing in ways that bolstered fairness in the application process. Both CRHE and MADE openly shared their selection criteria, grant funding ranges, definitions of key terms they used in the application, and their scoring rubrics. Their goal was to help applicants create competitive applications that met their requirements and expectations. Additionally, CRHE and MADE shared the number of awards that would be issued. MADE provided a rubric that described the characteristics of strong vs. less competitive applications. CRHE ensured that their selection criteria were available to applicants so they could build a lexicon of shared language during the application process.
3. Provide Applicants with Supports According to Their Needs
Equity requires acknowledging that applicant organizations have varied needs and require different supports to meet these needs. Both CRHE and MADE prioritized providing applicants with numerous opportunities for support throughout the application process. Each initiative provided technical assistance to help applicants construct proposal narratives and flexible budgets that allowed applicants to include budget lines to fund community participation efforts, including compensation for community members’ expertise and funding for meeting space, food, and childcare. Both initiatives also provided applicants with opportunities to participate in one-on-one calls with staff who were administering the grant opportunity.
CRHE provided applicants with an annotated budget narrative template and virtual sessions to support applicants navigating the online application system. MADE provided applicants with sample health equity goals to guide the development of their own, allowed applicants to submit written or video-based narratives depending on their preferences, and shared individualized resources and feedback with applicants based on their unique questions, preferences, and expressed needs. All applicants also received TA, resources, and feedback during the application process, and these skills and experience can be applied to future funding opportunities.
To further model equity in their application process, MADE awarded mini-grants of $15,000 each to all fourteen nonprofit applicants that successfully advanced to the second phase of their application process. These mini-grants were awarded to help defray the cost of organizations’ time and effort in preparing responses to the more demanding second-phase application. This not only ensured that applicants were provided with financial compensation to offset the resources they had to invest in the application process, but it also allowed MADE for Health Justice to provide resources to multiple institutions beyond the few who were ultimately selected to receive larger grant awards.
Centering Equity Benefits Funders and Applicant Organizations
Equity is both an outcome and a process. CRHE and MADE deliberately centered equity in their application processes so that they could achieve an equitable outcome: a strong and diverse pool of applicants that could all submit competitive applications.
An equity-centered application process resulted in the best of both worlds: as funders, AcademyHealth and the de Beaumont Foundation were able to identify the best applicants for each grant initiative to successfully advance community-centered research and data justice initiatives. Simultaneously, the community-based non-profit organizations that were best suited to make the most of the CRHE and MADE grant opportunities were provided with fair opportunities to compete. As a result, they were able to showcase their strengths and ultimately obtain new resources to advance community health. Moreover, the equity-centered design of each application process helped establish trust and build strong relationships between funders and community partners early on, laying the groundwork for successful partnerships from the start.
The experiences of CRHE and MADE demonstrate that centering equity into an application process is not only possible, but essential. In philanthropy, we have the power to drive change through the processes we use to grant funds. But we must practice what we preach. As funders, equity-centered application processes are one tangible way that we can show our commitment to equity extends beyond rhetoric, while also ensuring our dollars are well-invested. By designing grant application processes that are planned with intentionality, have significant time built into them, and provide different supports to meet applicants’ needs, we can ensure our grantmaking is fair, community-focused, and impactful.