• Do you think America’s political leaders should “disagree better?” We do too! See America’s governors leading the way, and explore actions you can take, at #DisagreeBetter.

Research Grant Requests

2023 Research Grant Requests: Guidelines and LOI information

Civic Health Project is committed to supporting research that contributes to the understanding of toxic polarization and its reduction. 

For the 2023 funding year, CHP will focus its research grantmaking on projects that identify and test effective interventions toward reducing toxic polarization. 

Priority will be given to research projects that:

  • Use an experimental design (survey, lab, natural or field)
  • Test interventions that are scalable, i.e. that have potential to have a broad reach and impact

Special consideration will also be given to projects that:

  • Test interventions in the field.
  • Work collaboratively with organizations that do work to reduce toxic polarization.
  • Are led by early scholars (at least at the PhD candidate stage and are pre-tenure)
  • Study the differential effects of interventions on specific populations (e.g. conservatives/liberals, younger/older people) or in different contexts (e.g. in person or. online, in community or business settings).
  • Build off of or apply the findings of the Strengthening Democracy Challenge.

In consonance with standards of open science we ask grant awardees to use the Open Science Framework (or other comparable platform) to pre-register study plans and share replication materials.

Grant size and funding use: Grants will be awarded between $1k and $10k; we anticipate the average award to be $5k. Funds can be used for subjects and study tools and materials. For collaborative projects with nonprofits, funds may also be used to support the nonprofit’s time and effort.

Requesting a grant: Grant requests are reviewed on a rolling basis. If you are interested in requesting a grant, please send a Paragraph Of Interest (POI) to julia@civichealthproject.org. In your POI, please include a brief description of the intervention you are interested in studying and your research design, as well as the size of the grant requested. The ideal POI will be under 250 words. Within five weeks we will let you know if your POI is within our current scope and, if so, invite you to submit a full proposal (you should expect that proposal to likewise be brief, between 500-1000 words,depending on the nature of the study and size of grant requested).