Introduction & Housekeeping
Erin: Hello. Welcome. Good morning. Good afternoon. I'm Erin Hagan. I'm the Deputy Director for Evidence for Action. And I'm happy to welcome you to our webinar to explain our new call for proposals. Our second round of rapid response funding to reinvest in racial and indigenous health equity research. I'm joined today by my colleagues, Doctor Claire Gibbons, senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Doctor Amani Nuru-Jeter, who's the Director of Evidence for Action.
So just to start off by giving you an overview of what we're going to get into today, we'll do a high level overview of the call. We'll go through the both the eligibility and the selection criteria in detail. And we'll talk more about the submission and review process. And then we will have ample time to answer your questions at the end of the sort of presentation. Just a little bit of housekeeping to share with you, the chat feature has been disabled among participants, although you can contact E4A program staff as needed. And, otherwise you should should submit your questions through the Q&A feature of the webinar platform. And again, either someone can answer those back to you in the in the Q&A feature, or most likely we'll answer all those questions live at the end after we've gone over all the other information.
The closed captioning, excuse me, the closed captioning is available and enabled, and you can turn that on on your own. And so it's not probably not automatically showing for all participants right now, but you can enable the closed captioning feature on your end if you would like. The webinar is being recorded and the recording in its entirety, the slides independently, and the transcript of this session will all be made available on the Evidence for Action website as soon as possible after the webinar concludes, and we will email those links to all registered participants, whether you attended today or not, you'll receive those links in your email. So with that, let's just get right into the content and I'll turn it over to Claire to kick us off.
Level-Setting & Introduction to RWJF
Claire: Hey everyone. Thanks for joining today. I'm Claire Gibbons, like Erin said, Senior Program Officer at RWJF in the Research, Evaluation, and Learning Department. You may have heard of RWJF. We're the largest private foundation focused on health in the United States, and we're working towards a future where health is a right. Through these three generational goals, which I won't go into, but you can go to our website, RWJF.org, if you want to read more about that. And that's in the chat as well. I just wanted to say welcome and thank you for coming and just comment very briefly on a couple things that we learned from the first round of offering rapid response grants, and that is that, first of all, I think judging by the proposals that we got in the first round, every one of you has an incredible career and is making incredible contributions to the field of health equity.
So this is unfortunately a competitive situation. We only have, so we have a very little bit of funding. It's as much as we have available for this, is what we're putting in. And we were able to get additional funding for this the second round. But we can't compete with NIH or the Department of Justice or any other sort of federal agency. But this is sort of the best you can do. Health equity research is a valid and important area of work. And RWJF is all in on health equity and addressing structural racism. So when, if, you submit a proposal, we want to fund you, but we're just not able to fund every single, every single one, but I just, I have to say that the first round was very, very difficult because every single person was making such an incredible contribution and had such impressive backgrounds and careers. And so I want to say that to you, too, because I know that that's also true of all 350 of you that are on today. And I also want to say that one of the really important, you know, selection criteria is just fit with RWJF. So we we do fund specific types of work.
You can look at the Evidence for Action website. You can look at rwjf.org. Erin is going to go over the the CFP pretty carefully today. But I do just want to say that we aren't able to just go way outside the bounds of what RWJF typically funds. So we really are looking at work that's focused on health equity, work that's focused on structural and systemic solutions. And that's sometimes different than what NIH has been funding, pretty recently. So think carefully if you can, about what does RWJF do and what are the kinds of approaches that we take to our work and also within Evidence for Action as a program. And that will help you frame for your proposal.
So again, thank you very much. Thanks for your work. Thanks for the amazing careers and contributions that you've made, and hopefully things will turn around again in the future. But, we are here for now to help, help you all stay in business and looking forward to hearing your questions. And I'll. Yeah, I'll turn it back. I'll turn it over to you, Amani, please go ahead.
Introduction to Evidence for Action (E4A) & the Call for Proposals
Amani: Okay. Well, good morning, everyone. So glad that so many of you were able to join us this morning. It is really, especially given the current moment, an honor to be in a position to be able to fund even a small number of research grants. And so we hope we're able to fund, as many of you as possible.
But, you know, as Claire said, we do have a limited amount of funding. But I want to start by just saying that. So first of all, Amani Nuru-Jeter, Director of Evidence for Action, and I'm also a Professor of Community Health Sciences and Epidemiology, specifically Social Epidemiology at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. And I just want to start by reaffirming what Claire said around the validity and importance of health equity research and of all of the work that you all are doing, despite what your termination letters or stop work orders may have said, despite what my termination letter said.
So regardless of who does or doesn't get funding, we're glad that you are pushing forward with your work on health equity because it is such an importantly incredible area of research. And it impacts real people's lives. So under this CFP, as Claire said, we really aim to sustain as much as we can and protect the health equity research infrastructure and the people who do this critical work. And we know that the research itself is one part of that. But you all or the other part of that, your career is in making sure that the people who are doing this work are able to at least get some bridge to protect you while you are trying to find that next opportunity, or whatever it might be to try to enable you to do, even if it's a small part of what you are originally, what you were originally funded to do, through whatever agency, was funding you.
So this is really critical work, and we want to support you as well as we want to support the research that you're doing. In doing so we really hope to foster kind of continued advancements in racial and Indigenous health equity, even in these challenging times. And one of the things that I'm most admire about the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is its deep commitment to doing this work. Despite everything that's happening, despite the fears that we all have related to what's coming next, you know, what's going to be cut next. But RWJF has affirmed and reaffirmed many times and is putting its money where its mouth is and really doing what they can to support this work. So I commend the foundation for that.
I also want to acknowledge all of the people who worked diligently to craft this call for proposals, and to meet this moment, and to help support you all who have lost funding through this second round. Many folks at the foundation and the Evidence for Action staff, just kind of my hat is off to them.b So thank you to everyone who got us to this point.
So rapid response research grants, this round two of rapid response research grants are really intended to, again, at least partially offset interruptions to federally funded racial and Indigenous health equity research projects. Again, we understand and I already saw a question in the Q&A about this. We understand that your original awards may have been much larger and have longer duration than what we are able to fund through the CFP.
But again, as Claire mentioned, we are attempting to bridge the gap between major funding and really help forward aspects of the original project that might be able to still be completed and really continue to advance health equity research. And through this mechanism, as it says in our name, Evidence for Action, we seek to build an actionable body of evidence. You know, our goal is to really support health equity research that is not just research that's going to be published in a scientific journal, but that can be used, that can be envisioned even now for how it can actually be put into action to make real change. And so we really want to help build that actionable body of evidence to influence the creation of fair, of fairness of equity and advance racial and Indigenous health more broadly.
So there's a lot more that I could say, but I'm going to stop there for the sake of time. I know you all have a lot of questions. Erin is going to get, and I know some of those questions are being answered right now, Erin is going to get into much more of the nuts and bolts of this. So I'm sure she will probably answer some of your questions while she's speaking. But please continue to put your questions in the Q&A. Because we will have time to engage in Q&A a little bit later. And with that, I will turn it over to you, Erin.
Key Dates
Erin: Thanks so much. Amani. Yeah, I've seen the questions rolling in. So thank you guys for starting off strong in that way. Many of your questions will be addressed during the webinar, and if they aren't, we'll answer them towards the end, as I mentioned.
So let's just start with the key dates and the timelines for this funding opportunity. Applications are due October 1st by 3 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. I just want to underscore that you really need to submit prior to 3 p.m.. At 3 p.m., the system automatically stops accepting applications. We're not able to override that automatic shut off and we we can't force applications through the system. We can't accept applications that are submitted outside the system. If you're experiencing technical difficulties, please reach out as soon as that starts happening. And please, submit well before the deadline. I can't stress this enough. For fairness, we really can't offer extensions or make exceptions to this policy. And so please make sure you're submitting well before this 3 p.m. deadline on October 1st.
The funding notifications will go out the week of November 17th. You will hear either way from us, whether you are recommended for funding or whether you have been turned down and everyone will hear in the same period that week.
And then we anticipate grants beginning by January 15th of 2026. There is an option in the application system for you to indicate the level of urgency for your funding. And the most urgent requests are those where perhaps someone's job is being preserved. And otherwise, in general, we're trying to expedite moving these funds just as quickly as possible. So, that's a goal of ours with this initiative.
Funding & Budget
So moving on. We have a total of $5 million to award through this call for proposals. I know some of your original grants exceeded that $5 million mark. So as we've mentioned, these are sort of very small infusions of maybe life support that you might think about. So the grants themselves can be between $50,000 and $200,000 for up to 24 months. Grants must be at least 50,000.
And so I also just want to take a moment to say you can request only the funds that you that were guaranteed and remain unspent on your original federal funding. So if you had a $1 million grant, but you had spent 850,000 of that, you can only request the $150,000 that remained guaranteed and unspent. And so if you had less than $50,000 remaining on your original grant, you may request the minimum of 50,000 and use those, whatever the differences, those additional funds. We especially encourage you to use them for dissemination purposes. And as Amani mentioned to move your research to action. We know that work is not always funded well by the federal government. And so we would encourage you to use a little bit of extra funding for that purpose, perhaps to further supplement your community partners or others whose work has been impacted, who are working with you on this and these projects? But you may only augment your budget if you are falling short of the minimum. So you may only augment up to $50,000 to meet the $50,000 minimum. You may not augment your budget if you already are requesting over $50,000. This is really important to note. We're really trying to support as many people as possible. And so please be discerning with your budget requests.
I also want to note that these budgets are inclusive of all budget periods, so it's up to 200,000 across, up to 24 months. It also could be $200,000 for 12 months. And it's inclusive of indirect costs. So this is different than the federal government arrangements. RWJF considers indirects, which might be might be comparable to what you would consider facilities, F&A, for federal funds. It is irrelevant of what your negotiated federal rate was. You may request only what RWJF’s indirect rate, as the appropriate indirect rate as it applies to your institution, which I'll cover in a little bit, in a future slide.
So, you can use these funds for any research related activities that include salary support, supporting community partners or other institutional partners, collecting data, analyzing data, capacity building as it relates to research dissemination. And as I mentioned, indirect costs. You may not request to do new research activities that were not originally covered by your federal funding. This is not a new research funding initiative. This is only to cover losses to funding to research that was already funded. Please do not augment, modify or otherwise add to your research. If it appears that that has happened, your project will be turned down.
It's really important to note that we're not re-scrutinizing your research, because it has already been reviewed and approved by some other rigorous review process. And so, we're relying on that process in our own decisionmaking. And so we we can we cannot accept new research proposals. We also just generally do not fund biomedical, clinical, or basic science. I know much of the federal funding does go towards that sort of research, and that's just not the type of research that RWJF or E4A funds. As a private foundation, we are not legally allowed to fund lobbying or electioneering. And we also aren't, you can't use our funds to support capital costs, construction, etc. And additionally, we cannot fund, RWJF, does not fund any drug or medical device research and development of new pharmaceuticals, for example. Those are all unallowable uses of funding.
Eligibility Criteria & The Project Director
So let's talk more about the eligibility criteria. And I know some of these were already mentioned. So there were some questions about some of these already. So these are really the most important things to note about whether you're able to submit an application. So first of all, you must have been awarded a federal research grant for which your funds are no longer available.
I'll talk more about what it means to not be available, but I think it's really important to note that it must have been federal funding. Now, it could be that your grant or your funding was a was passed through a state agency or other institution. If the funds originated from the federal government, you are eligible to apply. If you have questions about whether your, whether you're funding is eligible, you can email the program office with more information about your funding source, and we can give you guidance on that. But the funds must have originated with the federal government.
You also have to have received a notice of award. So if you submitted an application and then your application was no longer reviewed by a study committee or it was scored highly, but the funds never arrived or you never received a notice of award, you are not eligible to submit. You have to have received a notice of award. I am aware that some people received a notice of award and never actually got access to their funds. They got the letter of award, and then the very next week their grant was canceled. So we would would have to sort of revisit that those situations. But currently I would say those applicants are eligible. But perhaps our priority would be with folks who already their projects were already underway.
The lead applicant organization, as with all RWJF funding, must be based in the US or the territories, and we are, and the research itself must apply to US populations, people living in the United States or what is considered the United States. It could cross the boundaries of nations. But we would want projects that are, ultimately where the findings would accrue towards US populations.
The, also, small note that if you are a current grantee receiving more than 50% of your salary from an active grant, you are not eligible. We're, trying to prioritize folks who are in more precarious situations. So you could be a current grantee, but just receiving a smaller portion of your salary from that grant, and that would be permissible.
Just a couple other notes on this. Again, I mentioned that you have to have received your notice of award and you have to have some sort of documentation of a notice of termination or termination of the award, or the effective ending of your access to your federal funds. So that would include a termination letter, a formal letter or email from the federal government terminating your award. It could also include just the lack of responsiveness from your program officer. So if you've been unable to contact your federal program officer, and therefore you're unable to access funds that you should have been guaranteed, you would be eligible. You'll just need to submit a log demonstrating attempted multiple attempted communications with that program officer and the non responsiveness on their end.
And just to note that there's a wide range of projects that could be eligible. We are completely agnostic on your original federal funding source. In fact through the first round of Rapid Response, we funded applications from a variety of federal agencies that included, just for example, Department of Justice, Environmental Protection Agency, the Social Security Administration, the National Institutes of Health, etc. So we're again, there's no requirement around the source of the federal funds as long as they came from the federal government. And then I want to talk a little bit more about the project directors themselves. And so project directors from any professional background also are welcome. You need not be in the health sciences field, per se.
We are prioritizing, though, early to mid career project directors. So these are people who have received their most recent degree within the last 15 years. So, during or after 2010, we just believe that these applicants are in, again, perhaps a more precarious position in the career trajectories. And we're trying to support them. We this is not... Unlike the first round of Rapid Response, this is no longer a an eligibility criteria, meaning we won't screen out on this criteria, but we are prioritizing these project directors. And if you are not within 15 years of your most terminal degree, we do ask that you explain why you are the director instead of someone who is in that time frame. We learned during our last round that there are sometimes institutional barriers preventing more junior researchers from serving in project director roles, especially postdocs, fellows, etc. and so that might be a strong defense of the project director who is in a more senior position. But again, we really do have a preference for early career, early to mid career project directors.
We encourage applicants from all backgrounds and life experiences, and including Indigenous, Black, Latine, other people of color who are researchers to apply. And I really want to stress the importance that the project director for these grants need not have been the project director on the federal grant that was terminated. Anyone who is affiliated with that original grant can serve as the project director for these awards.
The Selection Criteria
So moving on now to the selection, the actual selection criteria. Those were all just related to eligibility and whether you're eligible to apply. I mentioned already briefly, but the reviewers will not re-scrutinize the scientific merits of the proposal, but they will review applications against the four selection criteria that we have specified in the call for proposals.
So the first being a commitment to racial and Indigenous health equity. So we're looking for, reviewers are looking for how well applicants demonstrate a sustained commitment to racial or Indigenous health equity in your prior research, your advocacy, your publications and your other professional or lived experiences. And there should be evidence of this commitment based on prior grants, publications. Community. Collaborations. Advocacy work, etc.. So we are looking for that history, which will I'll go into a little more detail where we would expect to see that showing up in a bit.
We're also looking for alignment with our core program values. Claire mentioned earlier that all of the applications we received before were exceptional and represented important work that was happening in the field. And so, we have to have some ways of determining which of those exceptional projects we're going to be able to fund. And so we will be looking for those that most closely align with what we might otherwise fund outside of these circumstances. And so the those values include a commitment to community centered research that is action-oriented and advances solutions to institutional racism and solutions to Indigenous health equity.
We're also looking for a track record of equitable partnerships with Indigenous peoples and/or communities of color. Whether your work reflects shared leadership throughout the research process and whether your approaches target root causes of structural racism or settler colonialism through systems level change and actionable outcomes. So these are really the values of Evidence for Action that we’ll be applying when reviewing your applications.
We're also looking for the sustainability of your impact and vision. So I know sustainability is often talked about in terms of programmatic funding and research funding. And how will you sustain the program? What we're looking to do here is less about this specific research project, and more about a long term career and a trajectory of the field. We're trying with these funds -- We're trying to sort of bolster the field, keep the field afloat during these precarious times. And so we're looking for whether applicants provide a vision for their career in racial and Indigenous health equity, and how well they demonstrate that this funding will contribute to preserving and advancing that vision. And there should be evidence that you have, again, a long term commitment to advancing health equity, and that funding will meaningfully support your growth and your career trajectory in this field. So this is really a combination of thinking about how specific research projects are preserved and how the careers of health equity researchers can be maintained.
Finally, we're looking for projects that are especially timely, and that also means: are you able to receive and allocate funding for the stated purpose in a timely manner? We know that many of you are facing internal institutional barriers in as well as having lost your funding. And so, we want your institution to commit to receiving and allowing you to use the funds for the purpose that is stated if you are awarded a grant. And again, there's a you'll see how that will show up in the application system. So of course we understand there are normal administrative processes. We're not asking you to sidestep those for your institution, but we want to make sure you will be able to use the funds for the stated purpose.
Additionally, we know that many data sources have been lost or other disruptions to the field have have occurred. And so we will be looking to make sure that you're still able to carry out the research project and that the other aspects of, or components of the project that would be necessary to continue work are still in place.
And so reviewers will apply these criteria, sorry, the criteria that were just on the previous slide when reviewing the original Aims page of your federally funded research, and there are applicant information questions, which we'll get to in just a second. But again, I just want to take a moment to stress the importance of submitting your original Aims page. Please do not modify that original Aims page. Whatever it was that you submitted to the federal government for original funding, whether it was a Aims page or a summary or a synopsis or sort of the overview of your research. We learned in the last round a lot about federal funding agencies and the differences among them that we didn't previously know. So whatever that may have been, please submit your original page if it appears that your submission has been modified, altered, recreated, etc., your application will be turned down. Again, wherever this funding opportunity is specifically for research that has already received funding through a federal source. And so you must submit your original documentation with your application. Okay.
The Application
Project Information Questions
We can move on now to the project information questions. So there's five open ended project information questions in the application. I really encourage you, even if you're not ready to submit your application, start one in the application and review system at my.rwjf.org so that you can get a feel for what information is going to be required of you, how to submit it into the application system, and so that you can familiarize yourself with all of this information in the system itself where you'll be submitting.
So the first question is about career stage. It's very straightforward. It's just going to ask you when you received your last degree. And if you are not within that 15 year window that I mentioned, why you are serving as the project director instead of someone who is earlier in their career. So this is a very brief, straightforward question.
We then will ask about your background and experience and we want you here to describe the project director's background and life experiences, and why they are qualified to lead the research project. This is actually a pretty brief question. And we are going to augment what you include here with your resume or CV or whatever other form of biosketch you might be attaching to the application system. And so I encourage you not to summarize your CV in this section, but to augment with information that might not otherwise be captured in a more professional document. We especially encourage information about your lived experience that might be relevant to your leadership in this research capacity beyond what we might see in your CV or resume.
I already talked briefly about the importance of the sustainability and impact of your vision. So this is where we'd like you to describe the project director’s career path and body of work in advancing racial or Indigenous health equity. The purpose of this question is to understand your commitment to racial and Indigenous health equity and your alignment with our program values. You should detail any past achievements, ongoing efforts, future vision, and career goals in this area. And again, this should be complimenting your CV without duplicating it.
And I just want to note that the sustainability and your impact of vision should sort of merge this project specifically that you're applying for with a longer term career goal. So how does this research, how might this funding be able to sustain your current project? And how will that project really feed into your longer term career goals?
Then we would like you to talk about how this project specifically will contribute to advancing health equity. And so please describe how the project was originally expected to contribute to improvements in racial and Indigenous health equity, and how this funding will allow you to continue to advance those goals. So, for example, we know that many of you had, as we previously stated, much larger research projects that were terminated. This funding will only provide a very small infusion of support into that larger project. And so this is the place where you can talk about what will you do specifically with this fund, these funds, what will these funds allow you to do? What component of your prior project will you be able to carry forward with this funding? And this is especially important because we know that previously many large research projects had a specific component that was related to racial and Indigenous equity and other components that were broader.
And so this might be a place where you can be clear that this funding will go to support that specific racial and Indigenous equity component, compared to other aspects of the project, again, for example. Finally, we want you to explain to us what the interruption and impact to your research plans have been. So how has the interruption in your federal funding impacted your ability to carry out the research as it was originally planned? Again, this you can continue to elaborate here. How will this funding help you advance your research goals? What what will you have to change? Again, just to be clear, not new. What will you do differently? What will you have to augment about your project? Because you aren't, you don't have your full amount of funding, for example. And please provide a detailed explanation of the specific aspects of the research that this funding will now support.
And this is again, especially important for people who had much larger grants that are only receiving partial funding support. If you had a small grant and this would fully reinstate the funding for that grant, then we would hope that you would carry out the original research as planned. Otherwise, you can, again, provide detailed information about the specific aspects of that original research plan that this funding will support, describe the significance of the proposed work and how research funds will still have actionable impact.
Budget Worksheet & Questions
So. Let's move on to the budget now. So there is a budget worksheet followed by budget questions in this application system. So two budget sections, the worksheet and the questions. The budget worksheet is only two lines direct cost and indirect cost. The total across the two lines. And if you have -- you can have up to two budget periods if you're requesting two years. So across the two lines and across all budget periods must be at least $50,000 and no greater than $200,000. The Application and Review System will not enforce those parameters in the budget worksheet, but we will not award grants outside of these ranges. So if you request over 200,000, we would only award a grant of up to 200,000.
And again, I just cannot stress enough you may only request the amount of funding that remains guaranteed and unspent on your federally awarded grant. Guaranteed means, if you had future subsequent years of funding or subsequent periods of funding, and you only had to meet certain criteria to receive those funds, but it was not a competitive process, and you can demonstrate that you have met those criteria, we would consider that guaranteed funding. If you would have had to compete, even if you were, by virtue of having received an initial award, you were slated into a pool of people who were able to compete for subsequent funding, than those subsequent funds, unless they have already been awarded, are not eligible to be requested in this funding opportunity. So, again, you may only request up to the amount of funds that you had guaranteed and unspent on your original federal grant.
The indirect cost may be up to 30% for nonprofits and up to 15% for colleges, universities, and health care systems. For profit organizations and government entities are not entitled to indirect costs, but you may contact us if that presents a hardship for you as a for profit or as a government entity, and we can review those decisions. You may also choose to waive your indirect costs, or you may choose to request less than the cap. These are caps on the indirect cost percentages. But that would be the second line. And again these would be the total budget is inclusive of indirect cost. Again, these are indirects in our case, are also known as overhead or facilities and administration costs. They're non-negotiable. And it's irrespective of whatever that rate might have been for your original grant. But also note that, the allowable uses of funds for RWJF differ from the allowable uses of funds for the federal government. And so, we indicated earlier the variety of different types of uses for those funds, including research support staff, which are often not covered in federal grants under the typical direct budget items.
And so just just a couple of notes about that, those decisions. And if you need to have further guidance or further discussion, you can contact the program office. And we also have a number of office hours coming up where we can answer questions about that as well. So I'll share more about that at the end of the session.
So the budget questions: there's two questions within the budget questions. The first is a non-mutually exclusive selection among or mutually inclusive selection of options that you can check for how you will spend the funds. These are things like research analysis, salary, dissemination, travel. We really are preferencing travel for research purposes. And and so please be discerning with travel uses of your funds.
Then in the second open ended box under that mutually inclusive question is an open ended box for justification and elaboration on how the funds will be spent for each category that you've selected. So in this box, we're interested in a narrative description, not a financial breakdown of your cost, but a narrative explanation, brief narrative explanation of how funds in each category will be spent.
Supporting Documents
So another important section of the application is the required supporting documents. So you must upload a notice of -- your original notice of federal funding. You must upload verification of federal funding loss. So this could be a termination letter. It could be an email. It could be a transcript of a phone conversation. It could be, as I mentioned, a log of attempted contacts with your program officer, attempted unsuccessful contact with your program officer, and then your original research aims and your original budget narrative/justification, not the financial breakdown of your budget, but the narrative or justification for your budget.
These are separate sections in the Supporting Documents section, and these must be original documents. For the 18th time, you must submit original documents here. Then you can also upload CVS bio sketches, resumes for the PD, for the project director and any co project directors. We are agnostic about the format, so submit whatever you have and it's the easiest for you to upload. And then again, just to note about the budget narrative, in this case, we're also more interested in that narrative description of how your funds were to be spent more than the dollars themselves. Although we are interested in the total award amount, we expect that would have been included in your notice of award. So I'm going to try to keep moving pretty quickly so that we have more time for questions in the end. So I'm going to move on to the submission process itself. This is a one step submission stage, so you'll just submit this brief proposal. Everything you're submitting here at this stage should be, what we would need to award a grant. And so this is all the information we're hoping to request from you.
Submission Logistics
Again, applications are due October 1st by 3 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. And late submissions cannot be accepted. We cannot accept submissions via email. We cannot review applications in advance via email. And another just really important note -- the Foundation's Application and Review System is protected by a firewall that makes it incredibly difficult to access outside of the United States or the territories.
And so if you started the application, you are the registrant. You may add contributors and you may grant them submission permission in the application and review system. And so if you are going to be, if the person who started the application will be out of the country when the application is due, either submit before that, before you leave, or assign submission permission to someone else who can submit for you. It's it is almost impossible to submit or even access the system from outside the United States. So, the, moving on to the application itself, here is again a list of all of the sections of the application. Each section has its own screen in the application and review system. And each of these sections in the system, you must click finished and then submit at the end.
So in order to submit your application, each section must be indicated to be finished. And then you will click submit. And now we're going to quickly just - here youcan see them right here. Thank you so much, switch into the actual application system. So you can see for each of those sections are reflected here along with descriptions. You can click on any of these sections and go into the actual section of any of these headings. Go into the section of the application. This is what it looks like on your end as an applicant. There's a couple of sections in here that I did not go over that I'll just, I just want to mention briefly.
Demographic Questions
There's a demographics section. This is for tracking purposes. These questions are not used during the review and award process. In fact, reviewers don't even have access to these questions. So I just want to reassure you that do the best that you can with the demographics questions. You must answer them. You can't submit without answering them. But, these are not, these won't weigh into our decision making at all. These are only for tracking purposes. And it's asking questions about the demographics of that lead applicant organization.
Financial Information Questions
There also are a number of questions under the Financial Information Questions section. The first question here is about a fiscal sponsor. And we learned that this was commonly misunderstood. So I just want to stress quickly here that most RWJF grantees do not have fiscal sponsors at all. So most of you will check no to this question. And there isn't a fiscal sponsor for your grant. If you select yes, it means that you have a fiscal sponsor, and that triggers a different sort of review process. Just to note that fiscal sponsors are typically used when the grantee organization does not have the capacity to administer or manage the award. And so it means that organization is serving in a role whereby they oversee the administration of the award, but they're not actually conducting the work. So if it's the same organization conducting the work and administering the grant, then you do not have a fiscal sponsor.
Also, I just want to note that there is a financial document section where you are asked to upload audited financial information for the lead applicant organization. Everyone must do this unless you have received a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in the last 12 months. We were recently made aware that there is an issue with the system right now where it's requiring these documents from everyone, even if you did receive a grant in the last 12 months. We're actively working to rectify that problem and we hope that it will be resolved before the deadline. But if you are in -- if it's easy enough for you to submit the documents, just go ahead and do so. Again, even if you've already done it. But if it's a burden to you, please contact the program office as soon as possible so we can be aware and actively work on this on your behalf. Okay.
The Application Review Process
I just want to quickly touch now on the review process. And the review committee and then the resumption of funds and then get right away and to other questions that we haven't answered because I know there's many of them. So applications will be screened for eligibility and then they will be evaluated by a number of reviewers affiliated with RWJF and Evidence for Action on the selection criteria, the preferences. And that I just went over with you. Final approvals are made by leadership at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and recommendations are made by our review committee. And then finally, if the... Oh and the reviewers themselves, I should just mention, are all health equity researchers, scholars, advocates, community members who will be looking at your applications and making those funding recommendations.
The last thing I will note is in awarding the last round of funds, this is a very dynamic time. People are losing funding and regaining funding all in the same day. It's sometimes partially reinstated. It's sometimes fully reinstated. It's sometimes contingently reinstated. So this is basically an honor system. We're not doing a lot of double checking.
Whether you are, aside from the the materials that we require you to submit, we're not then double checking whether those funds have been reinstated once they were taken away. But we encourage you to keep us abreast as much as possible of your situation. We will not require grantees to repay funds that have already been paid out. So once the grant is paid out, we will not ask you to return your funds even if your federal funding is fully reinstated. We may not pay out the full award if we paid you a portion of the award and your federal grants or federal funds are fully reinstated. But we won't ask for funds to be returned. And we do ask that if that happens and you have, excess funding to please be in touch with us and work with us to determine an appropriate reallocation of those funds.
Applicant Resources & Q&A
And again, just feel free to contact us via email or through our office hours to ask more specific questions. I mentioned that we are having twice a week [office hours] between now and the submission deadline. We will have open office hours, that anyone can drop into and have questions answered. We have an FAQ section, a Frequently Asked Questions section on the website where we expand on much of this information that we described today.
And we... Please read the call for proposals and you can also email us directly at evidenceforaction@ucsf.edu with other questions. And then my colleague just dropped a link to the full schedule of office hours in the chat, so that you can see that in that entire schedule. So with that, lots of information, we're going to jump into the questions for the next ten minutes or so.
And I will just say I'm going to prioritize now sort of higher level, more general questions that would apply to most applicants. If you have a -- I will also say that while we have become much more familiar with federal funding mechanisms since the last round of rapid response funding, we are none of us experts in federal funding. We work with a private foundation. And and so, very specific types of funding, we would probably need to gather some additional information about whether that funding is eligible or not. And so again, please just email us with those specific questions about, if you had a specific source of funds that you're questioning whether they are eligible or not. So moving into some of the, some of the questions, and I see that there were a number of questions that have already been answered.
So I'll try to sort of stick with some of those that are still remaining. And again, I'm going to try to go to those that are a little bit more general in nature. So if your question isn't answered today, please again, email us or come to an office hour.
So, there are some questions about research that was being conducted in rural areas that was related to outreach. And, and the there's no geographical preference for where the funding, would be dedicated. So rural, urban, suburban, tribal, tribal lands, etc. all eligible. There's no specification around where the research is being conducted.
There was a note that the last call, the application system, limited the page count for original aims, which would require that they be cut down. So if you run into a situation where the application system is limiting the page count, not the word count or character count, but the page count, please let us know. And we will work with you to address that. There is a page limit, but we have removed page limits for some of the criteria because we realized that this was a problem, or we've changed the page limits in this round. So if you're running into an issue, we don't want your whole original narrative, just the primary aims page like the summary of your project. So feel free to reach out and contact us. It may be that you will end up modifying that to meet our page limit, but we would just want probably to consult with you about how to do that again. Only we would only want you to be removing information, not adding information. And again, we need to be we we, don't want I think I'm not I don't remember the exact page on that right now. I think it's probably 3 to 5 pages, but that's purposefully so that we can, make sure to be able to review all the applications that we receive in a timely manner. So this should really be a synopsis of your research and hopefully your original aims page is fitting in that page limit.
So there's another question, about having have there been specific changes to the application questions or the format compared to the sample provided by the website? So I, I'm not sure which website you're referencing. So all I will say is, because RWJF has sort of some general FAQs that don't apply to this specific call. And the Evidence for Action website does list all the all the information on our website, which is updated to reflect this specific call. I do encourage you, however, to start an application and see what those questions are just to ensure that you're using the right information. And there have been some changes we added from our last round. So if you applied to the last round, there have been some changes since then. Small changes, mostly clarifications, and maybe 1 or 2 new questions that we're asking. So please start an application. And if you start the application and decide not to submit, that's not a problem. That deadline will expire and everybody's life will continue.
So another question says we lost a large center that had an overarching set of specific aims, and we would like to request continuation for a subset of the project that has its own set of aims. Should we submit the aims for the overall effort that was canceled, or for the specific subs project that we would like to continue? Amani, do you want to speak to what what you might want to see there?
Amani: Sure. Sorry. I was responding to someone in the Q&A. Can you repeat the question? Absolutely. Sorry about that. So there was a large center with an overarching set of aims and that entire funding was lost. But there was a subset of aims for a specific project. And that's what these folks are wanting to apply for that subset. So do we want to see the aims for the overall effort that was canceled, or would we want to see the specific sub project that this funding would apply to? I think in this case, we would want to see the aims for the specific sub project. Because that's actually what we would be funding and seeing the aims of the larger project may actually mask what you're proposing to do for the sub project. So the sub project aims would be most relevant and wouldn't hurt to add some language around how this fit within the broader scope of the parent project. But I would spend the majority of your aims page like submit that aims page, and maybe you might want to add a couple of lines, saying how it fit within the overall scope of the larger center project that got cut. But we really are going to focus on the sub project.
Erin: Great. Thank you. And the place to add those couple of lines is in the the Project Information Questions section. That's where you would want to make that connection apparent.
So there's another question about will the funds also cover program costs. This is an implementation science research project. So, it depends is sort of the question, or sort of the best answer, but we want the funds to really be supporting research. We're very familiar with implementation science research. And so we recognize that some of those funds would inherently go towards implementation from your original project, especially if this is a -- If this this funding is only contributing towards a sub component of that original funding, we would expect that some of it is still going towards the research, but certainly could include the implementation components as well.
I think also, Claire, maybe I'll ask you to speak to this next question briefly. So, it's about if someone has received a pause but not a stop. If we would consider those eligible. And I know this is just a little bit of a new, a new circumstance, but if you want to share your initial thoughts, Amani, if you want to contribute as well.
Claire: I'm a little stumped by this. Honestly, Erin, because I didn't realize that that's - is that what's happening these days? I think we'd have to see the details of what the pause letter is and understand also the timing. I would say if there's a pause with undetermined timing, where who knows what's going to happen in the future, then I think, yes, you would be eligible to apply. And again, just going back to what Erin said before about, you know, this is a very fluid situation and we just want you to keep in touch with us. So if your funds were reinstated or the pause was super short for some reason, then, you know, we don't want to spend funds on people who are actually kind of doing okay. We really want these funds to go to people whose funding has been terminated. So I think, you know, it depends a little bit on the situation. I think the best thing to do would be to contact the program office or attend their office hours with that specific pause letter so that we can help make a determination. Amani, what do you what do you say?
Amani: I agree, I don't have anything more to add. I think that we would have to address this on a case by case basis, because everyone's pause letters might be somewhat different.
Erin: Thanks so much to both of you. I'm going to just take one more question. I know there's so many that we didn't get to, today, so please, we'll update our FAQs as appropriate on the website. And also and, and also we have the office hours, as I mentioned. So there's one question about - there was a question about terminated diversity supplements. Those absolutely are eligible to apply. There's the type again, I just want to say the type of funding is less important than the source that it comes generally from a federal source originally, and then the focus of the research itself. So just to reiterate, we're sort of agnostic about either the type of award or the funding agency for most interested in whether that research is focused on improving racial and Indigenous health equity and, and continuing the the careers of researchers working in that field.
We have reached the top of the hour. And so, again, I just want to thank you all for attending. I encourage you to email the program office and or attend office hours to, gather additional information as needed. The webinar was recorded and will be posted on our website and emailed to registrants and thank you again and thank you for your work and your and your commitment to this, to these this field.