Opportunities at WT Grant Posted on March 19, 2007 Edward Seidman (bio) describes fellowships and other opportunities for receiving foundation funding.

[The WT Grant Foundation] just recently put out a request for proposals on doing intervention research on schools and community-based organizations and how they affect children. The idea there is that if you change the settings - and we know what makes a good setting, but we don't know how to create a setting - so our effort is to try to create those kinds of settings and do research on that to build the social science capacity to do interventions on settings so that those settings have a more preventive and promotive impact so subsequent cohorts of kids who go through them basically end up profiting by it and it's not one kid at a time.

We launched an experimental program called the Distinguished Fellow Program which is not for young career people but people who are 8 to 20 years in role who are already influential in their areas. So for people who are influential as researchers, it's now placing them over a period of two years for equivalent of six months' full time in a practice or policy question, so that they can really learn what the real world of policy or practice is, not so they can become a policy or practitioner, but then they go back to the research world, they ask the right questions and know how to frame the questions in a way that they may be used in the policy arena.

And the program goes the other way as well. So we also are looking for practitioners or policy people who are influential and try to go back into a research world to try to understand how research might be useful in their practice or policy world. So we currently [March 2006] have an experimental program. We have six people in the first cohort and July 1st, we'll establish another cohort.

The other program that's particularly for people who are really committed to, whether it's clinical science or developmental science, is kind of important and I've had a number of students over the years who went and usually shortly after graduate school or immediately after, took a Congressional Science Fellowship that's sponsored by SRCD, which the foundation actually supports one of the SRCD fellows, in which you then end up working usually with a senator or congressman or some committee head presumably on issues that you're aware of and you work from that end of the spectrum. So you're then bringing the research knowledge you know to that kind of thing. So the Distinguished Fellow is sort of the high-end version of what we do as junior people, and those junior people have actually been, who've been congressional science fellows have been models of people who have gone on to really be great bridgers between the world of research and policy.

« Back to Article