Complete Transcript from the Research to Advance Racial and Indigenous Health Equity Applicant Webinar

Hello and welcome to the Evidence for Action webinar on the Research to Advance Racial and Indigenous Health Equity call for proposals that we released last week. I'm Erin Hagan, I'm the deputy director for Evidence for Action. I'm also here today with our director, Dr. Amani Nuru-Jeter, and our program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Dr. Claire Gibbons.

We're really thrilled with the turnout for the webinar. Happy to have you all. So this is a so we'll be together today for about 90 minutes. So just to make sure everyone knows this webinar is going for 90 minutes. That is to provide sufficient amount of time to answer questions from you all while we're together.

So we're going to introduce the call. I want to note and will continue to note throughout this, conversation that there are two types of awards being made through this call for proposals. The Rapid Response Research grants and the New Research Support grants. They have very different criteria across the board. And so it's just really important to be clear on which type of funding you might be applying for and the requirements for each.

And we're going to try to get into detail about that today. And, just a couple, we'll have I mentioned ample time for question and answer. And so just a couple of notes on, housekeeping. You can submit your questions at any time during the webinar in the Q&A box of the of the platform.

The chat has been disabled. There were, a lot of people registered for this webinar. And so to help streamline our questions, we're just using the Q&A feature. Additionally, we are recording this webinar and the recording of the webinar, the slides themselves, a transcript of the information shared today will all be made available on the Evidence for Action website.

And, we will email that information to all registered participants, whether you were able to join in person or not, you will get that email with the link to all of those resources after the webinar. But, again, it will be recorded, and available for you after the fact. Without further ado, I'll turn it over to Claire to give us a little bit of intro into the Foundation.

[Claire speaking]: Thanks, Erin. Hi, everyone, and welcome. Thanks for joining us this Friday afternoon. Before I say, well, I'm Claire Gibbons, I'm the senior program officer at RWJF who works with Evidence for Action. And before I say anything else, I just want to say thank you to all of the Evidence for Action staff. This was really an all hands on deck effort, for their work on the CFP. And their work is really always excellent. But the CFP, especially, I think, stretched all of us, especially around making changes at the last minute and doing the best we can to, to serve you all in the field as things are, have been so, changeable, these last few months in our field. Thanks to you all, Erin and Amani and Steph and Natalie and Elissa and Jeana and Lacinda and anyone else I'm forgetting. But thank you very much. So. Yeah, I mean, what is there to say, right? Like, the last 100 days have been tumultuous for all of us. RWJF, as a private foundation, has a very luxurious position to be able to keep our resolve and our commitment to addressing structural barriers to health.

Explicitly naming racism and its manifestations as a key barrier to creating a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. And this CFP is one of the means, through which we are working to achieve that future. So you're going to hear a lot about what we're looking for, but essentially we're doing a couple different things. As Erin said, we want to fund new and transformative research that's timely and actionable to advance racial and Indigenous health equity. And we also want to help to protect health equity scholars whose work has been paused or canceled from federal funding sources. And Erin is going to give you a really deep and well-grounded overview about what we're looking for.

However, because we have so much interest in the field because of the environment that we're in right now, I just want to offer two comments about this and one for the Rapid Response grants. You know, our intent is to try to fund as many health equity researchers as we can. So you're going to see that we have a funding range available. We are going to be making decisions in part about how many people we can fund. So we really are asking you to think very carefully about the budget that you're submitting and the number of people related to those budgets. And the communities that you can support, in your work. So I just I really want to emphasize that because that is that is going to be very, very important. And I wanted to, to highlight that for you all. 

And then secondly, for our new research, we're really looking to fund the most timely and urgent and actionable work. So there there may be pieces of work that sort of are ongoing, and are kind of always important. And at this time that we're in now, we're really thinking about how can we meet the moment, what is the work that really is most urgent and most critical to fund?

So we want you to be really making the very best argument that you can to address that timeliness. The urgency and the actionability, because those are some of the most important pieces of selection criteria that we're going to be emphasizing. So I wanted to draw your attention to those today. And, and you'll hear, Erin kind of echoes some of those emphases. But thanks again very much for joining. We're we're thrilled that you're here. And, please do send us your questions through the chat and Q&A box. And, I will turn it over to you now, Amani. 

[Amani speaking] Great. Thank you. Claire. And thank you to all of you for joining us today and for your interest in this funding opportunity.

It goes without saying that it is especially important now more than ever to support research that advances racial and Indigenous health equity and the scholars and practitioners that have dedicated their careers to this endeavor, or those who are building their careers to support this endeavor. E4A, as some of you probably already know, is explicitly focused on supporting action-oriented approaches, focused on sustainable solutions to structural and systemic racism and colonialism as foundational contributors to health inequities.

Under this call for proposals, we aim to sustain and protect the health equity research infrastructure and the people who do this critical work, which is, of course, all of you. We will discuss in greater depth later in the webinar, but this CFP really does reflect an E4A commitment to community knowledge and community leadership in health equity research.

We believe that the knowledge, experience and expertise of impacted communities is essential to a holistic understanding of the root causes of health inequities, not necessarily what they are, because we know what they are, but the ways in which they operate to uphold systems and structures that preserve health inequities. We also believe that that same knowledge, experience and expertise is essential to identifying and developing solutions to advance racial and Indigenous health equity.

Accordingly, the CFP highlights the value we place on community partnership and community leadership. Power sharing, having a solutions orientation, actionability. As Claire just mentioned, this kind of focus on asset or strengths based work. So recognizing the assets and strengths that already exist within communities. And then additionally anti-racist and anti-colonial research approaches and practices. I also want to mention that this CFP and our review process has been heavily informed by our previous Indigenous-Led Solutions call for proposals that we released last year, as well as the Ways of Knowing symposia series we co-hosted last year, both of which were focused on uplifting community knowledge and recognizing the myriad ways in which knowledge is created.

For those interested, you can learn more about either of those efforts on our website. And I just want to say that we are so grateful to everyone who contributed their knowledge, insights, and time to making those endeavors successful, and those that continue to support E4A. So our learnings as an organization over the years, including from those partnerships and from our prior grantees, has really helped us evolve as an organization to get us to the point where our sole focus is to support work that disrupts structural and systemic racism and colonialism and its adverse health effects, which, by design, are unevenly distributed within and across populations.

With that, I want to acknowledge those who worked, as Claire mentioned, diligently to craft this call for proposals. We have such an incredible and committed team of individuals without whom none of this would be possible. So, as Claire said, moving on. Things have been rough to say the least. We are attempting to meet this moment through two approaches - Rapid Response Research grants and New Research Support.

Rapid Response Research grants are intended to at least partially offset interruptions to federally funded racial and Indigenous health equity research projects, and New Research Support will fund new, timely and actionable research to address ongoing threats to racial and Indigenous health equity. Through both mechanisms, we seek to build an actionable body of evidence for constructing justice systems that advance racial and Indigenous health equity.

A total of $5 million will be awarded through this CSP, approximately $2 million Rapid Response Research grants and $3 million to New Research Support grants. Each award type, as Erin mentioned, has distinct application and review timelines, eligibility and selection criteria and funding priorities, and again, we'll go over all of this in more detail shortly.

You are allowed to apply for both types of funding provided you meet all of the criteria. However, as Claire mentioned, funding is limited and needs are high. It is not our intent that applicants use both funding types to piece together a larger total amount of funding. Instead, we intend for the two approaches to serve different purposes and to support different types of research.

While we wish we could do more, our goal is really to support as many scholars, practitioners and projects as possible. I should also note that the specified grant budgets are caps, not fixed amounts. And so we ask that you be discerning in your funding requests. Again, our goal is to fund a large and diverse portfolio of grantees versus just a few grants at the maximum budget amounts.

With that, I'm going to turn it back over to Erin to get into the detail of each type of funding. And again, we'll have several breaks for Q&A. So please, put any questions that you have in the Q&A, whether it's now or during one of our breaks. So, Erin, I'll turn it over to you. 

[Erin speaking] Thanks so much, Amani, and thanks, Claire, for that intro and set up. We're going to get into the details now. And we're going to start with the Rapid Response Research grants. At the end of this session, we will pause to answer some questions about Rapid Response Research specifically. Then we'll go on to the New Research Support and answer questions about that. And then we'll open it up to general questions. We really are hoping to have at least half an hour for questions at the end in addition to the intermittent Q&A sessions.

So again, hopefully we can get to as many of your questions as possible. I see there are already a number of questions coming in. And hopefully we're going to get into answering those as I work my way through this Rapid Response overview right now. So within the Rapid Response grants, there is up to each grant amount can be up to $200,000.

There's also a minimum of 50,000. So we're looking for grants between 50,000 and 200,000. And again the 200,000 is a cap. So please be discerning around what you're requesting funding for. I want to reiterate that all our grant amounts are inclusive of indirect costs for this particular type of funding. I know we're backfilling to the extent possible, federal grants, and just, I want to draw attention to the fact that the way that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation thinks about indirect costs and the way that your federal grant would have considered indirect costs are different. And so we'll provide some more information about how you should think about that. But just to know that these grants are inclusive, those those amounts are inclusive of your indirects.

We're awarding grants for up to 24 months. You could ask for less, a shorter duration if you wanted. And, there are a variety of, permissible grant uses, salary, other research activities, community partners, etc. We'll get a little bit more into those, details of what is permissible and not, in just a moment. So the deadline for submitting a brief proposal for a Rapid Response grant is already right around the corner. It's the end of this month, May 28th. I hope that doesn't sound too daunting to folks. This is a very straightforward application. I'll talk more about what it looks like, but just to note, our priority here is really to move funds as quickly as possible. And so we are anticipating an overwhelming response to this particular funding opportunity.

And so the duration of our review process is to reflect the need for us to be able to get through all the applications that are submitted. We hope to have funds out the door by September 1st. And again, I'll talk a little bit more in detail about whether we might be able to move funds more quickly if needed for some people, but again, our goal is quick turnarounds for this particular funding opportunity.

So to reiterate, and this is incredibly important, we've seen numerous questions about it. You must, to be eligible for a Rapid Response grant, you must have already been awarded a federal research grant for which funds are no longer accessible. If you submitted a federal application that is being scored and a decision was never made, or your study section was canceled, those grants are not eligible for Rapid Response grants, although they would be permissible potentially if you meet other, eligibility requirements for New Research Support.

There are a variety of ways in which we're thinking about federal funding sources. We don't have a specific federal agency that we're targeting. So you might have received a federal grant from any variety of federal funding sources. I'll talk a little more about the selection criteria in a moment. But, again, just to reiterate that you must have already been awarded a federal grant.

And then the only other true eligibility criteria is that lead applicants must be based in the United States. We do have some other priorities for our funding, though. As you might have noticed, if you've read the CFP, we have a strong preference for early- to mid-career racial or Indigenous health equity researchers. And early- to mid-career references ten years post terminal degree, and within, if you are a tenure track scholar, you could be within two years of having received tenure. We are also... We actually have a requirement, I'll just quickly mention, that the project director on these projects not be current RWJF project directors or PIs pulling more than 25% of their salary from an active RWJF grant. If you've previously been funded by the Foundation, but your grant has ended, you are eligible. This is just an interest in sort of spreading the love, I guess, as we've been, as we've been referring to it. We're also especially interested in project directors who themselves have backgrounds and life experiences that are underrepresented on research teams and with research funding, including Indigenous, Black, Latine and other persons of color.

And I want to note here that the project director on our grants, on the grants that we're awarding here, need not be the project director from the federal grant that was rescinded. So, there's a wide range of acceptable, possible project directors. And it does not need to be the same person who is the PI or the PD on the project that was funded by the by the federal government.

I also, just want to take one other moment, to mention what it means to have lost your federal funds, which I should have mentioned on the prior slide. It could be that you've received a formal stop work order or some sort of cease and desist letter from the federal government. We also are including people who are unable to access their funds, either because their program officer has become unresponsive or maybe is not employed by the federal government anymore. And I'll talk a little bit more about how you can demonstrate that, that type of inaccessibility in your application. And, I already have noticed a number of questions about, well, what if I've been issued a stop work order or I've been issued a notice that my grant will not be continued, but my grant isn't officially, rescinded until September, for example. Those projects are eligible. And so you you are allowed to submit if you have received a formal notification that your grant funding will be ended, even if you currently still have access to it. 

I will note that we may, depending on the number and types of applications we receive, end up prioritizing people who are no longer able to access their funds at all. But that is a little bit to be determined based on the number of applications that we receive. And so you certainly are eligible to apply if you have received notification that your funds are no longer going to be available. So moving on then to, some of what you may or may not use the funds for, I think probably the most important distinction here is that for these Rapid Response awards specifically, we are only issuing funding for work that was previously approved under your federal grant.

So you may not add new research activities or new activities in general to this application. You must have previously been funded to conduct this work. We also, I think importantly, Evidence for Action and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation more broadly, does not fund biomedical, clinical, bench science, animal and plant science. And I know that people have lost funding who are doing that work.

So just to note, that's sort of a general, a general issue or types of work that RWJF does not fund. And we consequently do not fund through Evidence for Action either. And so, we primarily fund social science sorts of studies, applied science, we don't have a particular disciplinary focus, but again, social science oriented types of work.

And just to reiterate one more time that your grants are inclusive of indirect costs. RWJF has fixed indirect cost rates. And so for nonprofits, those are 30% of direct costs. For universities or academic institutions, those are 15% of direct costs. That's a fixed rate. So you don't have to further delineate how those funds are being distributed. They're just flat, a flat amount. You are not required to take those indirect costs. But again, unlike federal funds, there's no sort of negotiated rate. You cannot apply your negotiated rate from your federal grant to your RWJF award. However, I will say there are numerous costs that the federal government would not allow for you to write in directly into a grant that the Foundation would perhaps allow as a direct expense.

And so, just keep in mind that the indirect cost determination for private funders in general and RWJF specifically differs significantly from the federal government's. And I'll talk a little bit more about what the budget requirements will be for these awards. So, as Claire mentioned, we sort of wish we could fund every application that comes to us under the Rapid Response Research track and that we if we had sufficient funds and that those projects met just the basic eligibility criteria, we would do that. But we're aware that we're not going to be able to do that. It's just a reminder that we have $2 million in funds that we're intending to award through this particular track. And so we also will have to make decisions based on how well those projects align with these selection criteria.

And I want to dive a little more deeply into them now. So, as Amani mentioned, Evidence for Action has a strong commitment to racial and Indigenous health equity. And so we will be looking for how well applicants demonstrate their commitment to racial and Indigenous health equity. And that will be evidenced through prior grant awards that were focused on racial and Indigenous health equity, publications, community collaboration, advocacy, etc..

I do want to take just a quick moment here to to mention, first of all, that, or I guess really underscore that these grants are not solely for academic researchers. They could be going to community partners. They could be going to community organizations. And so I think some of our descriptions may sound especially academic in nature because, again, they're intended to backfill federal research grants.

But I just want to welcome people who may not fall under that sort of traditional academic research image to also apply for these grants, if you were funded to do work health equity research through a federal source. And so again, that came up for me because I mentioned publications and these could be academic journal publications, but they might also be other types of reports or information that's been shared more broadly demonstrating your commitment to racial and Indigenous health equity. We are also looking for alignment with our own program values. And so, as Amani discussed earlier, we are looking to see that you have a demonstrated commitment to community-centered, action-oriented research that advances solutions to structural barriers to health equity like, racism and colonialism.

And so we are looking for a track record of equitable partnerships with Indigenous communities or other communities of color. We're looking for whether your work reflects shared leadership in your partnerships. Whether your approaches target root causes of structural racism or colonialism through systems level change. And we're looking for action orientation or good projects. The sustainability of the impact and vision is really about how these funds might help you or help the applicant to sustain their career trajectory, their commitment, their vision, etc.

So we really see these as a one, as an infusion of one time, infusion to help sort of bridge these gaps that have been created or voids that have been created by the loss of your federal funding. And so we will prioritize projects where we feel like the funding we can offer will sort of help sustain the work or the person doing the work, at least in the short term.

And so that will be evidenced by sort of a vision for your racial and Indigenous health equity research career and how well you demonstrate that this funding could contribute to preserving and advancing that vision. And then finally, timeliness really refers to a couple of things. The point that Claire made earlier about urgency, and, and these funds being particularly urgent and useful in the current moment, it also refers to your ability to accept the funds, to allocate them in a timely manner, to not having a number of other sort of hurdles that you would have to or hoops you would have to jump through to be able to expend the funds as outlined in your proposal. So, normal administrative processes of your institution are acceptable, but we wouldn't want to see other potential delays in that roll out of the funds. And you should be able to carry out the project to a great extent as you originally intended. Now, we don't expect that our funds will allow you to complete the project necessarily, because we recognize that we have small relative amounts of funding compared to what federal grants may have originally allocated.

But we would if, for example, if you no longer if the data that you need for this project is no longer available, that might be problematic. Unless you're using the funds to reaccess the data or to be able to sustain some other component of the work. So these are the things that we will, these are the criteria that will apply to be able to sort of narrow down which projects we're able to support. And I'm going to get a little more into detail about how you're going to demonstrate these, these criteria. So I just want to underscore that all application materials must be submitted through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's application and review system, my.rwjf.org. You can access that system directly. You can access it through the RWJF website. You can access it through the Evidence for Action website. 

But again, all applications and all application materials must be submitted through the website through the application portal by 3 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on May 28th. We cannot take late applications for any reason. And so please submit earlier than 3 p.m.. Don't wait until the last minute. Especially if maybe your clock is not synced with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's clock. The system is set to automatically shut down at 3 p.m., and so there's no way for us to override that. And please don't email us any application materials. If you are having technical difficulties with the system, please do reach out to us and we can help you troubleshoot those.

Again, please reach out well in advance. I always recommend submitting at least a whole day prior to the deadline. Because of course, technical difficulties do arise. Although this is called a Brief Proposal, there is not an actual narrative proposal that you will submit for these Rapid Response Funds. There are a series of eligibility questions that you will answer.

You will provide a requested budget amount, again, somewhere between $50,000 and $200,000. And then you'll answer a question about the urgency of the funding. The urgency of your need for funding. There's three different levels of urgency. We ask you to please be, please be accurate in your assessment of how urgently you need funds.

One of the options is that you need funds immediately. And if you were to select immediately, you would be required to defend why you need those funds immediately. And if you don't defend it, we can't really use that as a justification. But the intent with this question is for us to determine whether we may be able to expedite some funds for people who, for example, might lose their job before the funds would otherwise be able to be available.

And the early issuance of these funds might help to preserve someone's employment, for example. So there's three different options of how you might indicate how urgently you need the funds. And know that even the lowest level of urgency, we still intend to make those awards by September 1st. So even the lowest level would still adhere to the timeline that we've laid out for you.

We also cannot commit for sure that we can move funds more quickly. This is a relatively expeditious, turnaround for us to begin with, but we're going to do our best to move the funds quickly. You also will be required to briefly provide a statement of the impact of the funding and of your project, and then you'll answer, whoops, sorry. Short answer questions for each of the selection criteria that I just, outlined. There also will be some basic information about your organization, the organization that you are employed by and the demographic questions. Note that even though these grants are likely to support salaries to a large extent, the Foundation does still make awards to institutions, not to individuals.

So, just keep that in mind that you do need to have an institutional affiliation in order to apply. It could be a your own consulting firm. But you do need to have an organizational mechanism for accepting funds. These are open ended questions. The selection criteria are all open ended questions that you will answer directly in the application system. Otherwise, the only other thing that you are submitting are documentation of your preexisting award and the termination of that award. So you will have to submit, you'll have to specify what the original source of funding was. And then you will have to upload your original notice of funding. You will also have to upload some verification of the loss of funding.

I'll talk a little bit more about what that looks like in just a second. You will need to upload your original research aims as an independent document. The timeline from your original project and the budget from your original project. We want these documents in their entirety. Whether or not aspects of those projects are relevant to the fund you're requesting.

In this moment, we will not re scrutinize the scientific merits of your original research project. Those projects were scrutinized by someone in order to receive the federal award, and we trust those people to have done a thorough review. So we are only using those documents to determine the extent to which your research meets the selection criteria that we outlined. 

And primarily, as you will have noted, that is related to your commitment to racial and Indigenous health equity. We're also asking for the CV or resume, the curriculum vitae or resume, of the project director and any co-project directors that you might have assigned in this project. So to verify your federal funding loss, you may be able to submit an actual letter or an email that you received from the federal government indicating that your award has been terminated.

It may have said cease and desist. It may have said stop work. It may have said termination. The language is not super important to us, but there you may have some formal notification that your award has been terminated. We have also heard on numerous occasions that people are just no longer able to communicate with their program officer, and therefore are no longer able to draw down from their federal funds.

In those cases, you can submit a log of attempted and failed contact with your program officer. So just sort of like a diary entry where you would indicate the date, the attempted communication, and the lack of response. And you would need to show that there was a history of attempted communications. It can't be that you just one time tried to contact your program officer and they didn't respond to you. You also could submit a series of email chains demonstrating lack of responsiveness. If it was over a phone call, you again can indicate that in a log. And the important piece is that wherever you were receiving the funding, the funds need to have originated from a federal source. 

We've gotten a few questions already at the program office about state agencies. So if the, and I know that federal government does do pass throughs at the state level. So if the original funds were passed from the feds to the state and then to the local organization, and those funds are no longer accessible, you would be eligible. But if there were some state funding source that was independent of federal contribution, that is not eligible.

So again, federal funding losses that are coming directly from the federal government. And I know a lot of this is pretty nuanced. We'll try to have some more, gets to more of your questions in just a moment. And also, I'll just start mentioning now we're hosting office hours weekly, from now until the end of the submission deadline, where you can come and get your questions answered and we respond to questions via email through the E4A email account as well.

The budget that you will submit is only a two line budget and a check box of how you're using the funds. This is in the simplest grant budget I've ever seen, so you really will only provide direct costs and indirect costs, and you will indicate whether you need one year of funding or two years of funding or some something in the middle of that - 18 months of funding. And so we're not asking for you to, to break out what your direct costs are. There is under this two line budget, a series of options that you could check that are not mutually exclusive of how your you intend to be using these funds. Again, these are things like salary support, stipends, participant incentives, etc.

There's another box where you can fill in if we haven't provided an option that meets your needs. And, and that is the entirety of the budget. Again, you may choose to, you may elect to request indirect costs of up to 30% for nonprofits or up to 15% for colleges and universities and other higher institutes of higher education.

For-profit organizations are eligible to apply, but they are not eligible to request indirect costs. And again, to reiterate indirect, sorry, the total grant amount is inclusive of indirect costs and you are not required to take this amount. You can take any proportion of 30%. If you're a nonprofit. You just cannot take over these caps.

If your funding from the federal government is reinstated, we are not asking for you to return the funds to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. We would like for you to reallocate those funds for some purpose that is consistent with the Foundation’s and Evidence for Action’s vision and mission. And so, if you happen to get your funding reinstated from the federal government, then you will just need to work with your program officer to determine how to reallocate the funds that you were awarded by the Foundation. I point this out now because if you receive a grant, this will be included in your grant agreement. And I just want to make sure that people are aware of how we intend to have the funds utilized.

So I'm going to pause now, take some questions about the Rapid Response funding opportunity. And then we will switch to the New Research Support in just a moment. So, okay. I'm just going to read through some of the most upvoted questions, and we'll go from there. So for the Rapid Response grants, there is a question about should we submit the original aims exactly as all aims were submitted for a defunded grant or submit only the aims from the original project that are relevant for the our request to RWJF? You should submit all of the aims. It is appropriate if you in one of the open ended questions where it seems well aligned to explicitly say this funding is related to aim one of our original study or aim three of our original study, or you are allowed to highlight the original aim that is most relevant. But we would like all of the aims and we ask that you I mean, we ask that you not be developing a lot of new documents for this application process. Please submit whatever you originally submitted to the federal government.

And I will also note, and then I do want to see Amani or Claire, if you have anything to add about this particular question. If you were awarded a grant that was inclusive of some research component, but perhaps the grant itself was not a big research grant that is eligible as well. You can apply for funding to support a research component of some other, perhaps, programmatic grant. And so in that case, I recognize that there may not have been an aims page, but presumably, like there are with research grants, but presumably you would have had to articulate what your research aims were for that component of the programmatic funding. And then you should just copy and paste those aims into a document that you can submit. 

Amani, do you want to make some other comments about the aims pages? 

[Amani speaking] Well, I was just going to say that, you know, our funding obviously is limited. And so we don't have the capacity to fund really large research programs. So our assumption is not that we're going to be giving you the amount of money to just pick up where you left off and fund your entire project.

For some of you, that may be the case, but it's also entirely reasonable for you to say, here were our original aims, and we would like funding to support this part of our research. Maybe you see that as the most logical next step to move the research forward. And that provides a good stopgap for you as you start looking for other funding and that sort of thing.

Or maybe you re-envision your project with a smaller set of aims, but you want to move forward on a particular part of it. And so I think seeing the overall set of aims is really important. But then being able to identify which aspects you’re submitting your request for would be really helpful. 

[Erin speaking] Claire, do you want to make some make any other additions? [Claire shakes her head no]

Okay. Great. So there's a couple more questions about the budget that I want to take and sort of combine them. So one is related to, are we judging projects on the budget? Yes, to some extent. And whether you might submit at the top end and then we can come back and ask you to decrease your budget. While sometimes this happens in Evidence for Action funding, it's unlikely to be the case in this situation because we will be receiving so many awards. So if you think that you could get by with a little less funding, ask for less funding. 

And the other thing I will say, which is related to this, second question about our reviewers judging, what if the the amount of funding you're requesting is covering multiple purposes? That is exactly what we're hoping for with those larger budgets. So if you're submitting a $200,000 request, we would hope and expect that that is to cover perhaps multiple people's salaries or perhaps some salary and some community participation or some subcontracted work or stipends or multiple things. So, you will again, the way that you select your use of funds is not mutually exclusive. And so if you're just selecting salary and you're only supporting one person at 180,000, all things being equal, we would be more likely to support one person’s salary at 60,000 than one person’s $180,000 salary, or $180,000 worth of research stipends and support to a community based organization and other expenses. But again, the all things being equal is an important caveat, I think.

And so the budget is certainly not the only thing that we're looking at. 

[Amani speaking] And I would also add that while we're on this topic of funding, someone asked a question about whether or not you can apply if your request amount is less than $50,000. And yes, the answer to that is yes, you can, you can still submit that, I was going to say something else, and now I'm blanking. But yes, the answer to that question is yes. 

[Claire speaking] And let me just also add in, because I saw a bunch of questions about the salary versus project costs. Is one better than the other? We were really looking for a sensible budget where you're asking for what you need to do, the work that you're proposing to do. And I would assume in most cases that would include coverage for salaries. That is usually the large, that's most of what our budgets go to is to cover time, right. It's you in front of your computer, doing your data analysis, doing the work to gather the data, etcetera, etcetera. So, I'd expect to see salary support. I'd expect that to see a pretty large proportion of the budget if I were going to predict. So we're definitely not, looking for the budget to go to one thing or another. We're looking for the budget to be as efficient as possible and to be a sensible as possible so that it matches what you're proposing to do in your project.

[Erin speaking] Great. I'm going to take a just a couple more questions here and then move on. Also, I'm so sorry to have a counter an opinion to you, Amani, but the system actually will not let people request under $50,000. So, unfortunately, no, the Foundation cannot award smaller grants. And the system in fact, will not allow you to submit a request under $50,000.

[Amani speaking] Okay. Apologies everyone for that misunderstanding. It's. I guess it's just a system issue. Although I will say the spirit of our grant is to support those who have needs, but I guess the system won't allow us to do that. 

[Erin speaking] Yeah, it is totally, a technical, both from the system perspective, but also from the Foundation's ability to award grants of certain sizes as a very large Foundation. Grants under 50,000 are administratively difficult for the Foundation to award. So, perhaps, though there are, components of your project that, you know, multiple components that might allow you to get closer to that $50,000 minimum of these awards. There there are a couple other quick questions I want to touch on and then and then move to the other type of funding.

And, and I think these are pretty nuanced but important points that people have raised that we haven't touched on yet. So, someone mentioned that their total grant has not been rescinded, but specific components of their work that were related to anti-racism or racial health equity were, required to be cut from the grant? Yes. Those are eligible. Absolutely. Please, apply to refund those components of your work through through this mechanism. And again, you could just submit whatever the notification you got that required you to omit those components of your project. 

And so just to that I think is a great point, because we've also heard a lot about diversity supplements being cut and that the original award is still intact, but there's no longer a diversity supplement available. Those are eligible for funding. And so, relatedly, someone asked about whether if they were a Co-PI on the original grant, could they be apply on this grant? Absolutely. You do not even have to have been a PI on the original grant. You could have been a community partner on the original grant. You could have been a postdoc on the original grant. You could have been a research scientist on the original grant. You just have to have been pulling funding from an original grant that you were no longer able to access. And I would actually encourage people who were not the Project Director or PI on the original grant that was funded to consider this as an opportunity for refunding that work because, we know for certain large federal funding sources that is, commonly more senior, scholars who are the PIs on those projects. And the intent here is to support people who may not have that sort of established track record yet, but are still working towards a career in health equity research. 

[Claire speaking] Erin, I wanted to address to two things. There are two questions that I saw come up related to is this going to cause harm to people? And one of them was mentioning an NIH rescinded letter that sort of threatens your institution's other grants if you continue to accept future DEI related projects.

You know, that's something that we can't answer for you. We do not want to do any harm to you or your colleagues or your institutions in any way. That is not the purpose of our work. And that's not the purpose, of course, of this CFP. But we can't answer that question for you. So I would just encourage you to go back to your own institution and speak with your directors of research, your mentors, perhaps your legal teams, to make the best determination that you can about the risk situation.

We are working very hard to try to both stand firm in our commitment of working against structural racism, and remedying the structural racism in our in our systems in the United States, while also not causing harm to our grantees. So please just make the best decision that you can. And if you apply and then can't move ahead in the future, we certainly understand that and would work with you.

So again, we can't really answer that question for you, but we're definitely aware of that. We have grantees in a lot of the states that have been dealing with this very difficult environment for quite a few years, and we try to make adjustments, you know, whenever we can. So if there are other concerns that you have related to that, you know, join the office hours with Evidence for Action or send send an email to evidenceforaction@ucsf.edu and they can help you with that.

The other question that I saw about harm is, are we going to keep people's names? And that is something that I hadn't considered before, but people who are putting names into the Q&A, we're not going to put names. We're not going to keep a record of that. So just, yeah. Highlighting that for the Evidence for Action team to make sure that that is not saved anywhere in the system. We're not keeping a record of that. We do keep records. If you submit a proposal to us, we are going to have a record of that and research proposals that are awarded are, published, publicly available, RWJF makes that information public. So, you know, again, take that into consideration. But nothing related to this webinar itself will capture your name or repeat it anywhere. So, it might show up again in the Q&A, your name might be there, but it won't show up anywhere else in the future related to this webinar. 

[Erin speaking] So thanks so much, Claire. In the interest of time, I'm going to move on from the Rapid Response Research track and know that we'll still have more time for Q&A.

So we'll come back to this in just a second. So moving on to the New Research Support. New Research Support grants. So we anticipate awarding about $3 million of the $5 million that we have for this call for New Research Support. These grants have larger caps, up to $500,000. However, having said that, we want to also award some, what we would consider, smaller awards through this mechanism. And so we anticipate awarding at least four projects of up to $250,000 and at least four projects of up to $500,000. I think our preference would be to award grants in a wide range in between all of those amounts, but, no, this is really to indicate to you that we do expect to award some smaller grants as well. Not all $500,000 awards. 

These grants can also be longer in duration, up to 36 months. And so the, again, amounts are inclusive of indirect costs and across the entirety of the grant duration. So it's 500,000 over 36 months, not 500,000 per year. 

This is a two step application process. Letters of intent. Anyone can submit a letter of intent, but full proposals will be invited. So only those who are invited to submit full proposals will move on to the next stage. Letters of intent for New Research Support are due July 16th. You will then be notified the week of August 25th whether you are invited to submit a full proposal or, you'll be notified either way.

And then full proposals are due December 17th and we will make funding notifications the week of February 16th. We expect grants to begin April 15th of 2026. We recognize that's almost a year away. But as I mentioned, one of the things that we learned during our Indigenous-Led Solutions call for proposals and during our Ways of kKnowing Symposia, are that for many, especially, Native communities and community based organizations, a longer submission timeline is really necessary.

And so one of the hallmarks of this track is that the lead applicants must be a community based organization. And CBOs are inclusive of, it's the sort of a broad definition that basically means not a university or academic institution or institute of higher education or a contract research organization. So otherwise a pretty wide range of what constitutes a community based organization.

However, we really are hoping that we will see partnerships still with universities or with academic researchers. It's just that the community based organization must be the lead, and academic organizations can serve as subcontractors on those projects. If as a community based organization, you do not have the administrative capacity to receive and allocate the funds you may use a fiscal sponsor.

Again, these awards are focused to US organizations. However, if you have international partners, you may subcontract internationally. But we would expect the research itself to be focused in the United States.

There are, six, seven selection criteria that we are judging grants on at this stage. And I want to note that we are, reviewers are applying these criteria at both the letter of intent and the full proposal stages. It's just that, of course, that the letter of intent stage, which is only a two page narrative, we expect a little bit less information and at the full proposal stage, we would expect to see significant detail about all of these criteria.

Still, at the letter of intent stage, we're looking for as much detail as you can give us about this information. And so please do. It's a two page narrative that you will upload. Please write in a narrative format, as much detail as possible. The letter of intent and the application system has a template. I could not underscore enough the recommendation to follow that template. We put a lot of thought into developing them. It lists the information that we need to evaluate your proposal. And if you include information that we don't ask for, you are shortchanging yourself on the space for the information we do need. 

So again, we're looking for relevance and significance to advancing racial or Indigenous health equity. And we're looking for actionability. These are probably the two top criteria we're going to initially be looking at, you should be able to in terms of actionability, you should be able to explain how the research findings will ensure tangible benefits for communities to advance some solution for improving racial and Indigenous health equity.

Then we're looking at the methodological appropriateness of your research design. We want as much information about your design as possible. I want to highlight the methodological appropriateness piece. This means that your methods should flow logically from your research questions. We do not have a hierarchy of methods that are sort of like the gold standard generically, absent the question. We fund a variety of different types of research approaches and methods.

The important part is that the methods are aligned with the research, overarching aims, and the questions that are being posed. And these methods should also be culturally appropriate and reliable. And when we talk about methodological appropriateness and how you articulate this, you should be able to clearly specify research questions, describe the approach, a theoretical framework that is guiding your work, how you will measure any outcomes you're interested in, the data collection and analysis plan. And, again, please provide as much information about those characteristics as possible. 

We also are concerned with the process of the research that we're funding. So it's very important to us that we are supporting equitable research practices. This means that it's not that equity is baked into not just the questions you're asking, but the manner in which you're engaging in the research. And so to reiterate, some of the monies points from earlier, this means, power sharing, shared leadership, and language and framing that is situated around the strengths and assets of the people who stand to be benefited by the research.

You need to demonstrate a clear and compelling connection between your research and health. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is an exclusively health funder, and so it's important that you demonstrate that connection. If you are, studying the impact of a solution on health, then you should have health relevant outcomes. We do consider health to be a broad concept. Both health and well-being, that are inclusive of physical, mental, social and emotional health and well-being. But you should demonstrate that the work that you're doing is directly connected to health in some way. We also are looking that the, characteristics are in place to be able to carry out the research that you are proposing, and that the study is designed in a way to answer the questions that you are posing.

And then finally, we're looking at the project team expertise. And so you should be able to demonstrate that the appropriate and necessary skills, backgrounds and expertise are reflected in your team. And this means not just academic expertise and methodological expertise, but also relevant cultural, contextual, and practical expertise. And we expect to see the perspectives of people who are directly experiencing the situation that you're interested in through your research reflected in the project leadership and decision-making throughout all phases of the research process. And just to sort of double down on this point, a community advisory board is sort of not sufficient for reflecting community priorities and leadership in the studies that we're looking to fund. So again, this this is sort of reiterate of what is a good fit for the Evidence for Action program. 

We are looking for projects that can drive transformative change. That definitely means you're not describing the problem in greater detail. It means that you're building upon an existing body of evidence, whether that be empirical or experiential, or anecdotal. And then we're focused on upstream systems level solutions. So not individual level interventions like cultural competency or implicit bias trainings. We do not fund curriculum development.

These should really be larger scale systems level changes, not asking individuals to change within a biased or oppressive system. And then we are similar, to what I mentioned under the Rapid Response grants, looking for a track record of commitment to racial and Indigenous health justice, conducting research in service of and in partnership with Native peoples and communities of color, applying the equitable research practices and ensuring your findings are actionable. And you can demonstrate that by having clearly engaged with both community members and decisionmakers before you're submitting your application and having your study be informed by their perspectives. 

So to touch on the submission process, as I mentioned, the initial submission process is a two page letter of intent that must be submitted before 3 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on July 16th, 2025. Again, similar to the Rapid Response Research, you must submit your application materials through the application and review system.

And there will be a series of project information questions, the letter of intent narrative, the two page narrative, and just a few other related materials, predominantly at the letter of intent stage. We're accepting CVS or resumes. And then there's a couple of other sections about your organization that you would need to complete. The specific project information questions that you will be responding to are to talk about the impact of the funds, why and how they will be particularly relevant and impactful in the current sociopolitical context. To talk about how your research, the specific research that you're involved in will help advance racial or Indigenous health equity. You need to describe how people who can make decisions about the solution you're interested in and who are most impacted by those decisions, have been involved already in developing the project and how they will continue to be involved throughout the lifespan of the research.

And then we're asking for a positionality statement that highlights, really, the identities and experiences of the core team members in relation to the project. So this is where you would talk about the expertise and experiences that your team brings to bear, collectively. In the letter of intent stage, you will submit an actual narrative. You'll upload a two page narrative. Again, I want to reiterate, there is a template, please follow the template. And you will speak in the template to the selection criteria that I briefly went over just a few moments ago. 

A couple of things to not include at the letter of intent stage. You do not need to include citations at the letter of intent stage. We do ask for them at the full proposal stage, but please don't include them at the letter of intent stage. Additionally, you should not include a breakdown of your budget at the Letter of Intent stage. You only need to provide a specific budget request, again inclusive of indirect costs. That budget request could be modified at the full proposal stage if needed, but there is a one line for you to provide what your budget request is at the letter of intent stage, and that's all that you would need to provide at this stage. At the full proposal stage, I'm only going to touch very briefly on this. If you are invited to a full proposal, you will get significantly more detail and guidance around that submission process. But I do just want to let you know that at the full proposal stage, there's a ten page full proposal narrative.

You will submit a more detailed budget and budget narrative. This is not the same budget that I described for the Rapid Response Research grants. This is a much more detailed budget as well as a full narrative. We also requested dissemination strategies. So it's important to know that for New Research Support, our funding is inclusive of dissemination. And we would expect for you to be disseminating your research prior to the end of your grant period.

So you should both budget time and money to disseminate your findings after you've completed the research. Similarly, you will submit a timeline, at this stage at the full proposal stage along with resumes, CVs, etc.. And note, that at the letter of intent stage here we only are accepting two CV's or resumes, but at the full proposal stage there is space to submit additional CVs at the full proposal stage.

You'll also be asked for letters of support, as well as copies of any measurement instruments, interview guides, focus groups protocols, etc. that you might be using in your research.

All right. Now I want to turn back to the questions. I just, do want to mention we're going to take a few questions now. Then we are going to cover a little bit more information about our review process, and then we'll open it up for an even more extensive Q&A period. So maybe we'll take about five minutes of questions here and go over the review process.

And then we will get into, then we'll get into the questions on any topics. I am going to, just switch the questions to most recent so I can prioritize projects that came from, New Research Support. Yes. Screening through lots of Rapid Response questions. And I want to try to prioritize those that are about New Research Support for the time being. And then I can come back to Rapid Response Research.

So there is a question about who your research might be focused on. I actually think this probably was submitted in the context of the Rapid Response Research, but I'm going to go ahead and field the question now related to the full CFP. 

So the question was, if your research is focused on Asian subgroups, do you qualify and why leave them out and not include them? So first of all, yes, your research could have been focused on any marginalized, oppressed community of color or Native tribal group or Indigenous community, and folks who have been doing health equity research would be familiar with the ways in which you might be thinking about how your research questions proposed, and how they were designed, in terms of the racial and ethnic categorizations and racial, ethnic, and nationality categorizations that we specified as preferences for the Rapid Response Research.

Really, though, that's related to the project director, not the focus of the research itself, and that is based on documented underrepresentation of those groups in federal research funding mechanisms. So that's how we came up with that list. But it's certainly not to say that that we are only funding Native, Black, or Latine project directors for the Rapid Response Research. We just used those classifications to exemplify the demographics of project directors who are under-funded by federal research sources, which has been documented at the federal level. I am, in the interest of time, and so just to reiterate the research itself, and especially for [New Research Support] grants, we really are looking for community based organization leads. We don't have the same kind of criteria or preferences for the project directors at that particular level. And in the interest of time and because, there is an overabundance of questions about Rapid Response, I'm going to go ahead and speak a little bit about the review process, and then I'll just open it up to questions more generally.

[Claire speaking] Erin, and sorry, there's just there were a lot of questions about what qualifies as a community based organization. So did you want to talk a little bit about what what we're thinking of and what we mean by that? 

[Erin speaking] Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that. I was my sorting feature was not working as well on my questions, but so community based organizations, from a purely legal tax perspective, could include nonprofits, for-profits, government entities, non-governmental organizations, etc..

We do have a preference for nonprofit designations, but we are able to make awards to for-profit entities. Ultimately, we are looking for community, I'm going to reuse the term, but community based organizations that are based outside of academic institutions. This is driven by our value in shared partnership and leadership. Our experience is that research grants have overwhelmingly gone to academic institutions and contract research organizations who are then expected to subcontract out to community based groups.

And we have heard that that is often, a bumpy process and that those partnerships don't end up playing out in some cases as well as we would hope they would. And so to help sort of, sort of swing that power dynamic, we are prioritizing community based organization leads. We do hope that ultimately, through our work and through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, work to transform the health science knowledge system that we will get eventually get to a place where it wouldn't matter which organization was the lead, that funds were always distributed equitably, power was equitably shared and true and meaningful partnerships were exemplified regardless of the lead organization. But at this point, we are focused on organizations outside of academic institutions to serve as a lead. Again reiterating that academic institutions may serve as subcontractors in those awards.

Amani, anything else you want to say about our focus on community based organizations before we move on? 

[Amani speaking] No, I think you said it all. I think the spirit of it really, is that we're trying to flip the typical dynamic on its head to honor our positionality of the importance of community voice, community expertise, community knowledge, where community based organizations and communities that are typically subcontractors typically get the short end of the stick. And so we're really trying to support not only community engaged, but community led research. So that's the spirit behind the CBO being the lead, institutional organization. 

[Erin speaking] Thanks so much. So in the interest of time, I'm going to move on just quick, just briefly to the application and review process to shed a little light for folks.

Applications will be reviewed by the leadership of the Evidence for Action National Program Office, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program officers and leadership, as well as an interdisciplinary group of racial and Indigenous health equity scholars, advocates, community organizers, and our reviewers are profiled on our website. For the New Research Support the reviewers that you can see on the website are probably that's probably representative of the full group of folks who might be reviewing your application. 

For Rapid Response grants we're expecting, again, an overwhelming rate of submission, and so we likely will pull in other folks to that review process, but they would still meet these criteria of being racial and Indigenous health equity scholars, advocates, community organizers, and doing this work, having a track record of doing this work. The process is that applications are screened and then assigned to a subset of reviewers to review based on the selection criteria.

And we will weight applications based on the selection criteria and preferences outlined in the call for proposals. Ultimately, final funding decisions are approved by leadership within the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Research, Evaluation, and Learning Unit. So that pretty much covers the review process. So I just wanted to get through anything that we had remaining. I will note that you again, you will be notified of the status of your application, but you will not be notified until the deadline. So even if you're submitting early, and we do encourage you to submit early, we may be screening early. But you will not receive a notification until the deadline and until the specified notification date. 

So at this point, I am going to turn back to the wide range of questions that we've been receiving. And I'm just going to I've sorted them by upvoted. So I'm going to work through them by upvote if other people want to upvote other questions. Now would be a good opportunity to to get your question answered. We have about 15 more minutes to take questions. And then just to reiterate, we will be hosting office hours. The first one is scheduled for on next Wednesday, the 7th of May. And so those are just drop in, although you do need to register in advance so that you can have access to the link. 

So there's a question about what is a fiscal sponsor. And could community based organization be the lead applicant, but the university submit the LOI and manage the funding. So universities are technically allowed to serve as a fiscal sponsor, although it is not our preference. A fiscal sponsor means a specific thing in terms of there are organizations that are set up as true fiscal sponsors. Which means that while they hold the money, they receive it and they disburse it. They do not have independent decision making power about how that money gets disbursed. Based on my own knowledge of universities, they're not well suited to serve as fiscal sponsors. But if you can demonstrate that the university meets the criteria that are required of fiscal sponsors, then yes, they could serve in that role. Having said that, they cannot be the lead organization. Fiscal sponsors, the designation of a fiscal sponsor lead comes in only at the full proposal stage. So at the letter of intent stage, the community based organization would need to be the lead. And again, when there's a fiscal sponsor, there is there is still documentation necessary about who the true lead application is. With the fiscal sponsor serving as again, just serving fiduciary responsibilities. Some of these questions have been answered. So I am going to just keep going. Yes. 

There's a question about whether we consider Tribal governments or, Indigenous or Native, community-based organizations, what in our Indigenous-Led Solutions call we called Indigenous Serving Organizations are considered community based organizations. Yes. So, Tribal governments and other Indigenous Serving Organizations may serve as lead applicants. And I just want to take a moment to mention that, again, we are not the federal government. And so we have no requirement around whether the federal government is recognized a tribal group in order to be eligible to apply for our funding. So while we certainly invite federally recognized tribes to apply non-federally recognized tribes and other Indigenous groups who don't have sovereignty recognition by the federal government, such as Native Hawaiians, are also eligible to to apply under both tracks.

Oh, this is a great question. And, Amani, I'm going to ask you to speak to it as well. And Claire, if you would like to. So, the question is, how do we find define research for this grant? For example, can it be secondary data evaluation as opposed to primary data collection? And one issue that CBOs may face is navigating IRB processes. And so it would be helpful to know what we expect from a research approach. And I'll just briefly say that, certainly secondary data analysis is allowed. We don't have specifications that are around again, the methods or analysis or approaches for the research that we fund. But I think the general question about how would we define research is a is a good one, especially in this context. And Amani, if you want to speak a little bit more to that and then Claire you might as well. 

[Amani speaking] I mean, I would just say that, you know, we don't distinguish between and, as Erin said, primary and secondary data collection. I think the goal around research and the way research is typically defined is around dissemination. So what are your goals with the work? And that's usually what is required to go through an IRB process is that it's not for organizational improvement. But it actually is to answer a question that is intended to generate knowledge that will be disseminated more broadly than just kind of held from the perspective of organizational development or improvement, if that makes sense.

Typically when your work is intended to be disseminated, then you do have to go through an IRB process. And the IRB is the one that determines whether or not it's going to be exempt, expedited or full review. So I think if you, if your organization, I think, you know, you could probably come to office hours to talk more specifically about particular cases around how you get through an institutional review board kind of process if your organization doesn't have one.

But anyone can be engaged in research. And again, the kind of key distinction is around dissemination. And remember that this CFP is really around action-oriented health equity research. So we do have very explicit review criteria around especially for the new research component, especially around kind of actionability and this idea of the work being able to inform short term action ability in one way or another, and you're able to actually articulate a dissemination plan and an action plan to move that research forward. So I hope that answered your question. But, Claire, you might have more to add on that. 

[Claire speaking] Yeah, I agree with what what y'all said. Thanks, Amani. I think with respect to this question about a literature review. So I, I don't think that question is like, what is research? It's what are we looking for? And so make sure you go back and look at the call for proposals. We tried to be really clear. We have a long history of funding for Evidence for Action. We have been pretty consistent. I think what we're looking at, what the majority of the work that we funded has been experimental or quasi experimental studies. They usually have a control group and a lot of times are looking at some sort of program or policy and whether it has the intended impacts, or not. So that's most commonly what we've done. We also sometimes do, fund work related to measurement. You know, it varies. I would say ultimately what we're looking for is something that that's actionable. So as Amani said, like, is this going to be something that can lead to an action by somebody in a community or a decision-maker that is going to then result in improved health for people, and, and health equity? So that's I think really what we're looking for. So a literature review I do think that falls under that's research. But for us a project that's a literature review only, that is not going to be very competitive for this opportunity.

[Amani speaking] Claire, thank you. I want to just add one clarifying point I was thinking about because someone mentioned IRB, I was thinking about research with human subjects. Obviously a literature review is still research, although it's not with human subjects. And wouldn't have to go through an IRB. But we are really not interested in research that is going to be conducted and then be published in the journal, and that's it, right? We're looking again is the action oriented pieces for actionability. That is a really important part of our review criteria. So we're going to be looking for that. 

[Erin speaking] Okay. Thank you both. So there's a pretty straightforward question about Tribal colleges not being considered community based organizations. I think for consistency, institutes of higher education are not considered community based organizations. Our intent is to focus there. And so, any sort of colleges, universities for track, again, let me just reiterate, this is the lead organization for New Research Support. So this CBO criteria does not apply to Rapid Research funds. And it only applies to the lead. So, Tribal colleges could be a partner to a community based organization on that application, just not the lead.

There are a couple questions about trying to determine if someone's early to mid career in particular. There's questions about folks like MDS and whether their clock starts after completing their MD, after residency, after their fellowship. Amani I don't know if you can speak more to this. I feel not particularly expert on that topic.

[Amani speaking] I mean, I would say that in general we think about kind of early career after you have finished your terminal degree. So in this case, you know, I would say for an MD, it would likely be residency, maybe as opposed to a fellowship. I would say not the MD, because you're still very much in training when you're in the residency. If you have more questions about the fellowship period, which I'm less familiar with, in terms of it being 100% training versus kind of practice, then I would recommend that you come to our office hours so we can talk about your particular case. But I would definitely say at least, after your residency and it could be given your situation that is after fellowship.

[Erin speaking] Great. Amani, I'm going to, have you speak a little bit more to this next question as well. I'll just get it started, but it asks what information are you looking for in the background and experience question. I worry about early career faculty needing to discuss their trauma as an academic in order to show their worthiness for the grant.

That certainly isn't our intent. We're not looking for worthiness at all. We're looking for, in fact, in most cases, especially with New Research Support, we're funding probably a team of people. And so we're looking that there's multiple perspectives and appropriate expertise reflected. That's what we're looking for. But Amani, maybe you want to say a little more about either what we are or are not looking for in those questions.

[Amani speaking] Now, this question, I saw that in the Q and A, and I was wondering if this question, Marguerite, I think you were the one that asked that question, if this was about the positionality statement or a different question. [Erin speaking] Yeah, it could be about the, there is a question for the Rapid Response that asks about whether the applicant meets the background. It reflects the background or expertise of, sorry, background or experience of the sort of preferences we've demonstrated. And I'll just quickly add to say there's, this is an, that this is a question that is open ended that you answer with first a yes or no, and then it's a very brief response, like, 800 characters or something like that. So that might help your response as well. [Amani speaking] Yeah. And I also think that one of the things and this is different for a more seasoned investigator versus an early career investigator, that we do have a preference for people who have a background and track record in doing this work. And that can be established through a CV.

Obviously, that's going to look differently for a more senior scholar versus someone who's just starting out in their career. But there are ways to to respond that convey and demonstrate that someone is starting out in their career to build a career in health equity research even if they don't have kind of a long list of publications.

So I think it's really kind of aligning that background and experience with the kinds of work, and careers that are aligned with the mission of E4A and with engaging in community-engaged, action-oriented racial and Indigenous health equity work. And so we're definitely not looking for people to revisit traumatic experiences. We're not looking for any kind of skills that one is worthy for the career, but we do want to make sure that the work and the career that people are building is aligned with the kind of research that is in the spirit of what E4A funds.

So I hope that answers your question. I think around positionality and just thinking about teams of researchers, it's not uncommon to see teams of researchers, for example, that are all academics and that don't reflect any kind of experiences that show understanding or awareness of the experiences of impact to communities. And so from a positionality statement perspective or even just background, it's being able to, I think also not necessarily, but to be able to demonstrate if it is the case that there are particular lived experiences that may also have contributed to the kinds of questions that you're asking and the way that you're engaging in your research, because we know although people say research is objective, we all know that it's not right. We all come to it with a particular stance. And those subjectivities are important aspects of the research as well. And so we want to know about that. 

[Erin speaking] Thanks so much. Claire, anything else you want to add? Okay. Great. So, I'm just going to take one more question and then have a couple more resource slides to show to you all.

So and this is a little bit more technical, but a couple of folks asked, could I clarify the definition of clinical research, given that much of the health equity research may fall in this category? And yes, we're aware of that, quite a few more clinical research grants have been rescinded. So, and Claire, you may want to speak more to this just in terms of what RWJF allows.

But typically, as I mentioned, we have a more social science orientation of the type of work, although there's not a disciplinary preference and also a sort of an applied or implementation science preference. So we would not be funding the development of new drugs or devices or treatments for a particular disease. We generally don't fund research that is focused on a specific disease mechanism or either identification of or treatment for that disease. So genetic research is typically not something we would fund. Also work that is happening solely in a lab with specimens is generally not the type of research that we're funding. Claire, do you want to say more about sort of that? 

[Claire speaking] Yeah. No, I think that's that's exactly right. And so when we say clinical, we're really talking about technical biomedical kinds of work. We're not omitting the importance of what happens in hospital systems, in doctor's offices. And of course, that's where a lot of health inequity is kind of carried out systematically. We're really, really interested in systems change. So that's one thing to be looking for when you're thinking about your question. So we're not really thinking about, individual behavior change. We're really thinking at a systems level sometimes that's kind of built on top of individual level decision making. But we're really thinking about systems. It's perfectly fine to submit a proposal that takes place in a health care setting. But it really is this kind of narrow, clinical, types of studies that RWJF doesn't do. And if you, you know, if you want to learn more about what we've funded, you can take a look at our grants on the Evidence for Actionwebsite and kind of see what we've done in the past to give you a good sense of of what works and what doesn't work as well. 

[Erin speaking] Okay. Thanks so much, Claire. I know there were so many questions we didn't get to. As Amani said many times, please come to one of our office hours. I'll use this just as an opportunity to say, there's a whole resource center that we've developed on the our web page e4action.org/funding with track specific, so Rapid Response Research awards or New Research Support specific Q and A's or FAQs. So I should say overview questions that are applicable to the whole CFP. Where this webinar will be archived on the website after, after we're able to get the transcript together, we're hosting weekly office hours that again, you should sign up for. You can submit questions in advance are technically drop in, but we're just, sort of protecting the space for you all to have those conversations. So you do need a link that you have to register for. And you can also submit questions directly to evidenceforaction@ucsf.edu , I think that brings us to the end of our time. And in fact, we're a little bit over time. I will leave the last word to you, Amani. To to send people in parting and just thank you all again for your, for joining us today. Amani. 

[Amani speaking] I actually have a question, Erin, because I don't know the answer to this. So forgive me everyone for asking this question live. Are we archiving the Q&A so that we have the questions that were not answered? 

[Erin speaking] So thank you. That's a great question. It's perfect that you end that way. So we're not archiving in a sense of publishing it verbatim somewhere where someone could access it, particularly because people's names are associated with their questions in this Q&A. But we will update the FAQs on our site to reflect questions that may not have previously been reflected. Many of those questions are answered in the FAQ. It's a very extensive and interactive FAQ, platform on our website, but we will be updating it both with questions from this webinar, but also questions that come up during the office hours and questions that we receive through the email account that may not already be reflected on the website.

So just wanted to say thank you again, everyone, for your interest. Obviously if you're on this call, there are many of you and based on the questions that have been impacted, because you would be eligible for the Rapid Response. So we also just kind of, you know, want to affirm this kind of need to continue to support, health equity research is such a critical time to continue to support that work.

And that is our goal, although we know we cannot meet every need, our hope is to be able to at least support, and meet some level of need at this time. So thank you all so much.