Academic-Advocacy Collaboration Grants

Posted by on October 20, 2006

[posted from Comm-Org]

Necessary Knowledge for a Democratic Public Sphere Program
<a href="http://www.ssrc.org/programs/media">http://www.ssrc.org/programs/media</a>

WHAT:
The SSRC is pleased to launch its next round of the small grants project for academic-advocacy collaboration in the media and communications field. This round will provide grants of up to $7,500 for research that clearly supports advocacy, organizing, policy and/or campaign uses in the media and communications field in the US. The grants are intended for short-term work, completable and usable by advocacy partners within the next 4-12 months. Awards will be made on a rolling basis.

WHO:
In this round, proposals must be:
(1) Submitted by a US-based nonprofit advocacy, organizing or community group working on media and/or telecommunications issues. (Groups with nonprofit fiscal sponsorship are also eligible.)
(2) Structured as a partnership with an academic researcher based at a university, college or other research institution. This can include advanced graduate students.

There are no citizenship requirements for participants in these projects.

CRITERIA:
Please review the attached list of criteria carefully BEFORE preparing your proposal.

All projects must:
* Be strategically useful in their proposed advocacy and/or organizing context.
* Produce scholarship that meets academic standards.
* Have a realistic workflow and timeframe.

The selection committee will also favor proposals that:
* Address issues of disparate impact on communities on the basis of race, class, gender, ethnicity, age or other identity/status category.
* Build capacity-skills, tools, experience, access to data sets-within the "user" organization and/or community.
* Have a clear plan for the dissemination of the research to target audiences.
* Have uses outside the immediate intended context.
* Use methods or models of research that have proved effective in similar contexts.
* Reflect diversity in the staff or group involved with the project.

Bonus points for proposals that:
* Involve collaboration between two or more advocacy/community groups in the project design and the plan of use for the research.
* Use participatory methods to engage community and/or advocacy group members in framing the questions, data collection, and/or analysis.
* Are related to issues of telephony, publishing, privacy, intellectual property, independent media, or spectrum.

See also sample topics below.

BACKGROUND:
The Collaborative Grants project is part of the Necessary Knowledge for a Democratic Public Sphere (NKDPS) Program of the Social Science Research Council, working in partnership with CIMA: Center for International Media Action and the McGannon Center for Communications Research at Fordham University. The program is funded by the Media, Arts and Culture program of the Ford Foundation.

The NKDPS program is launching a series of funding opportunities to help increase the production, use and capacity for research to serve public-interest advocacy and organizing around media and communications. These mini-grants for collaborative advocacy- academic partnerships have been initiated to meet the short-term research needs of advocacy and policy actors.

Several other funding projects will be launched in the next months, including a "Research Bounties" project that place prizes on advocacy-defined research and a larger program to support longer-term advocacy-academic research partnerships and training.

For more information on the program, see <a href="http://www.ssrc.org/programs/media">http://www.ssrc.org/programs/media</a>.

For all program-related inquiries, please write to mediahub@ssrc.org