Benefits and Drawbacks of Foundation Funding Posted on October 19, 2007 Harold Pincus (bio) suggests framing your project differently for foundation funding.

The benefits of foundation funding are that number one, it's extraordinarily flexible. So that you can submit a grant sometimes to some of them and get a turnaround very rapidly. They also don't necessarily have rigid rules about what gets funded or the time frames and so forth. They like to fund innovative programs; things that are novel. It's important to remember that foundations are more interested in changing the world than they are in supporting research. And so, often times you have to make the case that what research you're doing is going to change the world in some fundamental way. Only a small proportion of foundations actually fund research. A lot of them tend to fund service delivery components or bricks and mortar types of things. Sometimes it's useful to frame the research that you're doing less as research and more as information that is going to influence clinical practice, or that actually will be done in conjunction with establishing a new clinical program.

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