Funding decisions will be made by a judging panel composed of our agency and philanthropic partners. Funding applications are jointly submitted by an agency staff member and university faculty member. Each project is then evaluated for funding based on the degree to which it fulfills the following criteria:

• Addresses a priority need for a NYC government agency, with clearly defined outcomes.
• Includes a sound methodology that is likely to lead to credible findings.
• Is likely to influence an agency's programs, policies, or operations in the near term.
• Is likely to produce novel findings of interest to cities and researchers beyond NYC.
• Commits to securing a letter of support from an Agency Commissioner or equivalent before funding is disbursed.

See here for examples of successful funding applications from last year. Note that questions will evolve slightly for this year.

Courtesy of The Robin Hood Foundation, we have a dedicated funding pool this year specifically for projects that help alleviate poverty and support economic mobility. For more information, see the section below on Poverty and Economic Mobility Projects.

In addition, some universities have supplementary funding for their own faculty:

• If you are a Columbia University faculty member interested in supporting a project that leverages data science and/or artificial intelligence, you may contact the Data Science Institute at dsi-seed@columbia.edu for more information.
• If you are a New York University faculty member interested in supporting any project, you may contact Trinh Eng at trinh.eng@nyu.edu for more information.

At this year’s event, Robin Hood—New York’s largest poverty-fighting foundation—is offering a dedicated funding pool specifically for projects that produce actionable insights from administrative data to alleviate poverty and support economic mobility. 

New York City's affordability crisis is deepening hardships and exacerbating obstacles faced by low-income residents, making it essential that the government and its partners apply available resources as effectively as possible.

Administrative data, collected and held by government agencies as part of their routine functions, hold significant but often untapped promise to improve policy and practice. These records—generated through program enrollments, service delivery, and more—can reveal what's working, how to support residents more holistically, and where resources can be better targeted. Yet that potential goes unrealized when the data is siloed and inaccessible to those best positioned to act on it.

This funding opportunity supports projects that operationalize data in new ways to improve poverty-fighting results in any relevant domain, including education, job training, benefits access, or other areas. Eligible projects may involve data sharing and linkage across agencies, analysis to improve program targeting or service delivery, or research that surfaces patterns relevant to policy. Priority will be given to projects that are designed to yield measurable results within the project period and whose findings will directly inform decision-making going forward.

Robin Hood is interested in exploring topics like: What are the career and salary trajectories of NYC public school graduates who do not go to college, and which factors enable these graduates to secure good jobs and long-term economic security? To right-size this broad topic into an actionable, six-month project, an agency might propose looking at the effects of apprenticeships, and using the resultant data to refine its apprenticeship program offerings. 

Poverty and Economic Mobility Projects should adhere to the one-slide template here, which includes a representative example of eligible projects.