New competitions for the foundation’s small and large education research grants, as well as racial equity research grants, will be put on pause.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | mirza kadic/iStock/Getty Images
The Spencer Foundation announced last week it will temporarily stop issuing new grants during the first half of 2027 to “undertake a strategic refresh of these core grant programs and of our decision-making processes, informed by conversations with the field about where support is needed most,” foundation leaders said in a public letter. New competitions for the foundation’s small and large education research grants, as well as racial equity research grants, will be paused from January until June, at which time the foundation plans to share its new grant-making approach.
The number of proposals the foundation receives has “more than quadrupled” over the past four years, and Spencer increased grant making by 20 percent to respond to declining federal research funding and universities’ growing financial strain. Existing programs “ask too much of applicants and reviewers and take too long to get funding into the field,” foundation President Na’ilah Suad Nasir and Programs Director Leah Bricker wrote.
“We recognize that pausing a portion of our grantmaking, even temporarily, may feel like a reduction in opportunity at precisely the moment when support is most urgently needed. We take that concern seriously,” Suad Nasir and Bricker wrote. “At the same time, continuing to operate programs that require substantial investments of time from thousands of applicants while offering an increasingly small likelihood of funding is not a sustainable or responsible response.”
