Special Initiatives Grants
Special Initiatives Grants
Supporting mission-driven projects and organizations



Bridging Community Divides
Organization
National Conference on Citizenship
Grant Purpose
Measuring, Growing and Embedding Civility
This project will promote and measure civility by producing a Civility Index, working with three pilot communities to embed civil discourse practices into public settings, and convening local leaders to refine and disseminate these tools and practices.
GRANT AMOUNT
$187,047.00
Organization
National Institute for Civil Discourse
Grant Purpose
CommonSense American (CSA) Program
This grant will increase the scale and impact of the CommonSense American Program. This membership-based program currently has 46,000 politically balanced members who select the most meaningful issues ripe for bipartisan action. Members then spend 90 minutes per year reviewing the brief and weighing in with their views on the topic. Members then engage Congress with the results and NICD staff brief Members of Congress and their staff on the overall findings. The grant would deepen member engagement by funding the creation and delivery of an option for members to discuss with each other the chosen policy topic in an online facilitated conversation plus increased membership recruitment.
GRANT AMOUNT
$200,000.00
Organization
Sandra Day O’Connor Institute
Grant Purpose
Civics for Life – Multi-generational Online Civil Discourse Program
Civics for Life will become the “go to” online destination for civil discourse and civics education with nonpartisan, fact-based content and interactive activities including:
1) Online Public Square: Highly curated and moderated online webcasts that will include the use of breakout rooms for the audience
2) O’Connor Ambassadors Civics & Debate Clubs: Free high school program to teach the fundamentals of civil discourse, leadership skills and promote civic engagement
GRANT AMOUNT
$200,000.00
Preventing and Reducing Violence
Organization
Cure Violence Global
Grant Purpose
Alternative Dispute Resolution Training for Community Conflicts
CVG seeks to pair the deep expertise and lived experience of CVG training staff with an experienced educational designer to produce trainings for the CVG network and the broader field of community violence intervention. This project will leverage state and federal funding for community violence intervention by providing trainings needed to make this work more effective, more universally understood as a public health crisis and more sustainable. Embedded within these trainings will be strategies for maintaining worker safety, based on the latest understanding of the risks and challenges frontline workers face and the field’s response to these risks. Additionally, CVG will retain a communications assistant to expand networks, develop training platforms for the wider public and, disseminate trainings. This proposal includes a comprehensive third-party evaluation of the grant deliverables.
GRANT AMOUNT
$542,000.00