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 any of our three interest areas:

Community Building - Projects that will make a positive, long-term difference in at-risk populations today. Ideal projects will benefit the most people to the greatest degree.

Historical Discovery - Projects that will give us a better understanding of the past, so that our society can make better decisions for the future.
- We are not accepting unsolicited grant applications in this area at this time.

Scientific Breakthroughs - Projects that can unleash the potential of science and catalyze breakthroughs for the benefit of mankind.
- We are not accepting unsolicited grant applications in this area at this time.

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.