A young person's personal interaction with a social cause can easily turn into lifelong commitment. Youth who have had positive experiences in contributing to, for example, the struggle to end disease, tackle gender inequality or educate young people, close at hand, are likely to make sustained contributions to that cause. Flying young people around the world to see first-hand different challenges facing different groups achieves deep engagement, but is not scalable. At the other end of the spectrum is engagement that requires little effort but has little lasting impact on the person involved. This engagement has scale, but not depth.

Investigators are invited to propose innovative and creative solutions that uses new knowledge to positively engage young people in one or more of these goals in both scale and depth. The focus can be local, but to support Global Citizenship for the Global Goals they must also link in a clear way to efforts elsewhere – at a regional, national or global level. The initial phase, which would be funded under this initiative, must demonstrate a path to a more sustainable and scalable program. It must collect quantitative data to inform decision making for follow-on funding.

We accept applications from both private and public organizations. You must be affiliated with an organization to apply -- we are unable to make grants to individuals.

What we will consider funding:

Proposals that:

• Address the Challenge by showing how they will lead to actions taken by young people that will positively impact one or more of the first six Global Goals.
• Outline concepts that have the potential to be scaled up.
• Focus on learning and gathering data and evidence about how to do positively engage youth by doing that effectively, rather than trying to go for scale or solely developing research.
• Have the potential for scale and depth at reasonable costs.
• Focus on a specific geography or community, but should link to efforts beyond that locality.
• There are no geographic constraints as to where in the world proposals should be focused.
• Are entirely online and technology-based, or blended technology and face-to-face, or predominantly offline, with limited use of technology.
• Explain how the activities proposed will lead to the results expected, based wherever possible on experience and data
• Show how the proposed concept or program could in the future achieve the scale and depth of engagement with a clear set of measurements at the pilot stage.
• Describe the innovative approach captured by the concept. The initial pilot project must test the concept at some minimal scale that produces data upon which decisions for future funding could be made.

What we will not consider funding:

Proposals that:

• Require more funds than the US$100,000, or more than 12-18 months to demonstrate success
• Lack a robust implementation plan or organization.
• Lack a complete, coherent design for how it will work.
• Don’t focus on Global Goals other than 1 – 6 (these may be subject of future challenges).
• Do not address the challenge.
• Have no capacity for scale in the future.

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