Guidelines

The mission of the Waitt Family Foundation is to support organizations doing pioneering work with the potential for large-scale impact. We believe in groundbreaking discovery, exploration, and ingenuity that drive lasting and widespread benefits to communities. Through our associations with the Waitt Institutes and our grantees, we support programs that help us understand our past, improve the present, and prepare for the future.

We are looking for bold new ideas, and people with the skill and determination to make them happen--ideas that can make a deep, lasting difference in the lives of many people. We want to support programs that will make a difference that can be scalable and replicated throughout the world. These ideas can be in either of our two areas of interest:

Ocean Exploration, Conservation and Rejuvenation - Projects that will make a positive and sustainable impact on our declining oceans.  The ideal projects will help raise global awareness through a variety of channels including scientific research, education, media, and government policy.

Scientific Research and Exploration - Projects that can unleash the potential of science and catalyze breakthroughs for the benefit of mankind.

In each of these areas, we look for strategies to create tangible, measurable benefits -- solutions that will make revolutionary change in the lives of many, not incremental change in the lives of a few.

We are interested in proposals to test new approaches to problem-solving, as well as projects that have been successfully tested and are ready to go full scale.

Ready to apply? Read on.