Common Reasons for Turndown

The Brief Proposals we received reflected all applicants' commitment to the critical work of advancing health and wellbeing. Unfortunately, we received far more applications than we are able to support due to limited resources, we were only able to fund 4% of the applications we received. A turndown is in no way reflective of the quality or value of the proposed work. 

Common reasons for turndown included:

• Applicant had not received a formal notice of award;
• There was insufficient documentation of termination at the time of submission;
• Research was ineligible for RWJF funding (e.g., pharmaceutical research, population of interest is outside of the US or its territories);
• The project did not involve research; and/or
• Research was not focused on racial or Indigenous health equity (e.g., inclusion of a racial or Indigenous study population amongst other study populations was insufficient for this particular call for proposals).

We received a remarkable 710 Letter of Intent (LOI) applications for the Research to Advance Racial and Indigenous Health Equity New Research Support grants. With our limited funding resources, we were able to invite fewer than five percent of applicants to submit full proposals. These were very difficult decisions. 

LOIs were most commonly turned down because:

• There was insufficient detail about the study design;
• The project described did not contain a research component;
• The proposed solution(s) targeted individual education or behavior changes, rather than systems-level changes;
• Research was not focused on racial or Indigenous health equity (e.g., inclusion of a racial or Indigenous study population amongst other study populations was insufficient for this particular call for proposals);
• The project focused on the diagnosis or treatment of a specific disease.