Funders’ Network Encourages Practices to Close the Gap Between Research and Real-World Solutions

The Transforming Evidence Funders Network (TEFN)—a collection of more than 80 philanthropies and public funding agencies that convene to catalyze collection action around work at the nexus of research, policy, practice, and community—has announced that it’s facilitating a peer learning and exchange program for 15 funding organizations that have committed to both change a funding practice or process and assess the outcomes of that change.

The participating organizations include the AIR Equity Initiative at the American Institutes for Research; the Canadian Cancer Society; The Patrick and Catherine Weldon Donaghue Medical Research Foundation; the Education Endowment Foundation; Canada’s International Development Research Centre; the Lumina Foundation; the University of Michigan Water Center, host of the National Estuarine Research Reserve System (NERRS) Science Collaborative through a cooperative agreement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Lenfest Ocean Program and Programs in the Biomedical Sciences; Wellcome; The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; and the William T. Grant Foundation.

The program fits with the network’s role of offering funders a space for peer learning and collaborative action, which has inspired some participants to reimagine their own funding practices and processes. These changes aim to better enable research to contribute to progress on long-standing societal challenges—including, but not limited to, climate change, economic inequity, and health disparities.

The announcement comes as TEFN participants have been exploring a variety of strategies, including supporting innovative approaches to research synthesis (i.e., combining findings from multiple studies), infrastructure for networks and consortia that span the boundaries between sectors, and participatory approaches to research—which are also called “engaged research,” “research co-production,” “research-practice partnerships,” “integrated knowledge translation,” “collaborative science,” ­and other names.

Engaged research cultivates mutually beneficial partnerships between researchers and groups who are close to the issues being studied and who stand to benefit from the findings—such as communities, service delivery organizations, and government agencies. Interest in engaged research, and the other strategies that TEFN organizations have been exploring, flows in large part from the promise these approaches hold for integrating different types of knowledge and experiences into real-world problem-solving efforts.

Changes Funders Are Making to Their Practices and Processes

These approaches often require project timelines that account for necessary relationship-building, new or different project team expertise and capabilities, and unique success measures. The creation of the peer learning and exchange program is a response to the reality that few practical guides or resources exist to support funders who want to strengthen their practices and processes to ensure their grantees are well equipped (and appropriately resourced) to implement these promising strategies. The program’s regular exchanges serve as a mechanism for the group to offer peer support and problem-solving, with participants sharing their real-time experiences exploring and implementing changes to their funding practices and processes. Many participants are assessing process outcomes, such as the relationship between application guidance and who receives funding. Others are beginning to assess the contributions that funding practices and processes make to longer-term, downstream impacts such as policy and practice change.

Most of these changes that participants are discussing fall in one of three areas:

• Centering Key Voices and Attending to Power Imbalances and Inequities
  Several funders are working to adapt their funding processes and practices to center the perspectives and priorities of communities that are close to the issues being studied. Some of these efforts explicitly aim to help funding recipients confront long-standing power imbalances and inequities. For example, some funders are working to commit grantmaking resources to Africa, focusing on funding African organizations and African-led partnerships directly. Other funders are integrating policymakers, practitioners, or community groups into funded project teams or into processes for developing funding priorities, drafting application guidance, or reviewing and selecting proposals for funding.

• Rethinking Reporting and Impact Measurement
  Other funders are exploring new methods for monitoring projects and adapting reporting requirements. The funders working on changing these practices are sensitive to (and attempting to limit) the administrative burdens created by the reporting requirements that come with their funding. These shifts in monitoring and reporting link to broader efforts to expand research impact assessment beyond publication and citation counts. Examples of funding practices in this space include assessment and evaluation criteria that target impacts in policy, practice, or community settings, as well as the creation of narrative reports produced collaboratively by funding recipients and program officers.

• Strengthening Capacity of Funding Organization Staff
  Some funders are working to strengthen the capacity of their staffs to ensure the research initiatives they support are positioned for use in policy, practice, or community decision-making. To do this, some funders are developing guidance to ensure that funder staff have the knowledge, skills, and competencies to cultivate and support grantees that are working toward impacts beyond academic publications—such as fostering sustainable networks, strengthening evidence generation and use capacities, and influencing policies, practices, or behaviors. For example, some funders are developing guidelines and toolkits to equip grantmaking staff to give greater priority to research processes that engage evidence users throughout the project life cycle.

Funders recognize that shifting practices—and learning from those changes—must be an ongoing process. As funders continue to strengthen their individual practices to help close the gap between research and real-world solutions, new information and assessments will be needed to understand what works and why.

As a parallel effort, TEFN has begun curating a set of field-tested, promising practices intended to build on other funder efforts, including Wellcome’s library of funding practices that aims to help address funding inequities. The goal is to make funder-focused resources easier to access and use while continuing to encourage thoughtful assessment and evaluation of practice changes to build the knowledge base needed to establish best practices.

Funders interested in developing and assessing funding practices to better support work at the nexus of research, policy, practice, and community are invited to share their own promising practices, describe lessons learned from assessments of their funding practices, or join TEFN’s monthly learning sessions by writing to [email protected].

Ben Miyamoto works on The Pew Charitable Trusts’ evidence project.