Africa Impact Seed Funding (ISF) 2024

The Pulitzer Center Impact Seed Fund (ISF) supports educational and engagement initiatives addressing the most critical issues confronting the planet’s ecosystems and communities.

The 2024 ISF focuses on a range of topics, including rainforests, oceans, and climate change, with a particular emphasis on its interconnectedness with workers and vulnerable communities.

Impact Seed Funding (ISF) is a microscale grant provided by the Pulitzer Center to support education, research, or scientific activities with the aim to enrich the perspectives and knowledge within the university community—specifically students and educators. ISF facilitates a deeper understanding of complex problems and encourages the exploration of solutions and innovations to address the impact of human activities on rainforests, oceans, and the climate crisis.

They aim to support projects that inspire changes in perspectives, narratives, and actions, fostering a more informed and empathetic community. By utilizing Pulitzer Center-supported stories, the ISF initiative aims to:

• Improve the awareness and critical thinking of students and educators about complex issues related to tropical forests, oceans, and the climate crisis, including their impacts on vulnerable communities. It encourages members of the university community to explore innovative solutions to address these impacts.
• Equip students and educators to take action and drive change to protect the environment, as well as the rights of those most affected by environmental destruction.

The ISF is designed to be flexible and responsive to the needs of educators and communities, enabling applicants to create activities related to pressing issues of climate and environment relevant to the local context.

Utilizing stories as the center of the proposed projects: The Pulitzer Center’s programs have produced journalism stories that bring to light local perspectives, often from voices that are rarely heard.

These reports focus on underreported stories and situations that are crucial to better understand the challenges around tropical forests, climate change and oceans. These reports produce high-quality visuals, in-depth analysis, and data resources capable of conveying complex issues in a powerful and digestible way, making them excellent educational and communications tools. As such, they can generate important inputs for ISF-funded projects.

All proposals must utilize at least one story reported by Pulitzer Center-supported journalists and explain how it will be relevant in the project.

Objectives

• They believe in the power of knowledge and the role of education and educators in addressing multidisciplinary issues in social and environmental topics. Therefore, the ISF is designed to provide seed funding to educators globally to raise awareness of key issues to their communities around the world and contribute to aspired positive changes. The ISF provides micro-scale support to:
  • Initiate new collaborations or build on existing collaborations among professors, researchers, students, local universities, most affected local communities, and journalists;
  • Increase engagement between educational communities, journalists, and Indigenous and traditional populations;
  • Encourage the use of creative materials (e.g., photographs, short videos, documentaries, podcasts), infographics, data visuals, and information from the reports in teaching materials, student activities, curricular and classroom materials, or scientific publications;
  • Facilitate the adoption of the results presented in the reports into relevant research and other scientific products.

Funding Information

• ISF grants range from USD $2,500 to $4,500 with different budget sizes in every regional opportunities, so applicants have to read through guidelines that are appropriate to their region or countries. They expect projects to be implemented within four months of approval.

What they fund?

• Collaborative projects with Pulitzer Center-supported journalists or multi-disciplinary educators;
• Collaborative projects with the most affected local communities, such as: knowledge exchange activities, student immersive learnings, biodiversity expeditions, and citizen journalism;
• Insertion of results into teaching materials, campus debates, hackathons on social issues, student-led debates, and dialogues;
• Support for webinar series, seminars;
• Production and dissemination of visual content to support learning aids (short videos, documentaries, podcasts);
• Small exhibitions on campus, such as photo exhibits or film screenings;
• Journalism workshops for student press clubs;
• Communication activities to promote citizenship related to the proposed themes;
• Support for research activities: Adoption of data to improve the accuracy of ongoing research, insertion of data or knowledge in a book chapter.

Outcomes

• The activity must present intended impacts with audiences in the academic community (students or faculty/research fellows) and civil society that align with one or both of the following outcomes:
  • Improve the awareness and critical thinking of students and educators about complex issues related to tropical forests, oceans, and the climate crisis, including their impacts on vulnerable communities, and encourage the exploration of solutions and innovations to address these impacts.
  • Equip students and educators to take action and drive changes to foster protection of the social and environment discourse as well as the rights of those most affected by socio-environmental destruction.
• Projects will ideally collaborate with the most affected communities, e.g. co-conceiving ideas with Indigenous communities, community leaders, or local organizations working directly with disadvantaged communities; collaboration with smaller universities in local areas.
• The project must demonstrate a strong Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion approach.

Eligibility Criteria

• Applicants should be university professors or researchers based in an institution.
• Applicants are welcome to propose a project through a consortia of educators from universities in one or more regions of the country.

For more information, visit Pulitzer Center.