June 7, 2023
Federal Funding Opportunities
The Build to Scale program aims to build public and private capacity for entrepreneurs and innovators to invent, improve, and bring to market new products and services in critical, emerging, and transformative sectors and industries. Under the Build to Scale Program, the Economic Development Administration is soliciting applications for the following two separate competitions the Venture Challenge and Capital Challenged.
The Venture Challenge seeks proposals that support technology entrepreneurship and accelerate company growth. The Venture Challenge seeks to start and speed up regional growth through technology-based economic development (TBED) and by strengthening regional innovation ecosystems that promote the commercialization of new technologies, grow industry clusters, and lead to more good-paying good jobs. This competition offers three funding levels—Build, Scale, and Ignite—designed for grantees to implement programming that reflects the maturity and capacity of their respective innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems. New this year, the Ignite Challenge is designed to support the development of nascent technology-based ecosystems to build organizational capacity to design and implement TBED projects through feasibility studies, impact analyses, and planning to address regional innovation needs, including access to capital, and to build formal partnerships to lay the foundation for this type of work.
The Capital Challenge provides operational support for the formation, launch, or scale of investment funds that seek to raise equity-based capital to deploy in scalable startups (e.g., angel, seed, or venture funds) or for organizations that expand equity-based capital access and deployment within a community, region, or regional industry (e.g., angel networks or investor training programs).
This program supports activities to establish community-based partnerships to develop cybersecurity career pathways that address local workforce needs. A successful project will create the local conditions, e.g., infrastructure for education providers, employers, and others to develop cybersecurity education capabilities, to create an ecosystem equipped to fill a critical skills gap for the economy.
This program supports the participation of low-income parents in postsecondary education by providing grants to institutions of higher education for campus-based childcare services. Programs must aim to leverage significant local or institutional resources, including in-kind contributions, to support their activities. Programs must also utilize a sliding fee scale for childcare services to support a high number of low-income parents pursuing postsecondary education at the institution.
Through this program, the Institute of Education Sciences seeks to support innovative and unconventional research that has the potential to make dramatic advances towards solving seemingly intractable problems and challenges in the education field and/or to accelerate the pace of conducting education research to facilitate major breakthroughs. This year, the Transformative Research in the Education Sciences grant program will have a special focus on accelerating learning and reducing persistent education inequities by leveraging evidence-based principles from the learning sciences with advanced technology to create high-reward, scalable solutions.
The purpose of this program is to develop curricula and train medical students, physician assistant students, and primary care medical residents to provide high quality primary care services to individuals with limited English proficiency, individuals with physical disabilities, and/or individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities with the goals of improving health outcomes for these populations.
This program supports projects that use humanities approaches and resources to explore the human experiences of war and military service and their repercussions for those directly and indirectly involved. While the forms and technologies of war and military engagement may change over time, deeper questions and connections persist and often find expression through the humanities. As such, Dialogue projects intend to enable veterans and civilians to consider their own experiences in light of these questions and within a broader context.
National Science Foundation Discovery Research PreK-12 Program applications due November 8, 2023
The goal of the Discovery Research PreK-12 program (DRK-12) is to catalyze research and development that enhances all preK-12 teachers’ and students’ opportunities to engage in high-quality learning experiences related to the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The program’s objectives are to: build knowledge about how to develop preK-12 students’ and teachers’ STEM content knowledge, practices, and skills; support collaborative partnerships among STEM education researchers, STEM education practitioners and school leaders with the goals of extending relevant scientific literatures while developing more effective practice; and build the field of STEM education by supporting knowledge synthesis, interdisciplinary interactions across fields and stakeholders, and the development of novel and robust ways of assessing teacher and student learning, engagement, and skills. Outcomes of DRK-12 projects can include but are not limited to promising, evidence-based products that can be used by others to support the success of all teachers and all students e.g., curriculum, teaching and research tools, and models of collaboration.
The Centers of Research Excellence in Science and Technology (CREST) program provides support to enhance the research capabilities of minority-serving institutions through the establishment of centers that effectively integrate education and research. CREST promotes the development of new knowledge, enhancements of the research productivity of individual faculty, and an expanded presence of students underrepresented in STEM disciplines.
