The international aid organization Catholic Relief Services, anti-hunger group HarvestPlus, Rice University’s global-health institute, and the International Rescue Committee and Sesame Workshop, which submitted a joint proposal, are the finalists in the MacArthur Foundation’s $100 million grant challenge.
Cecilia Conrad, the managing director of the competition, named the finalists in a conference call on Tuesday, saying that MacArthur’s Board of Directors met for two days last week to whittle down the pool of eight semifinalists.
“This competition, a call for solutions for any problem from any organization located anywhere, reflects our desire for openness to what we don’t know, which can be so important in philanthropy,” Ms. Conrad said. “We hope that by funding at a level far above what is typical in philanthropy we will be able to address problems and support solutions that are radically different in scale, scope, and complexity.”
The organizations will present the four final proposals December 11 to the foundation’s board in Chicago, with the winner to be announced immediately thereafter. The presentations will also be streamed on the internet.
Big, Global Issues
The four finalist projects aim to address varied global development and social issues. The proposal put forth by Catholic Relief Services would improve how orphanages around the world care for children and would provide support services to families so that fewer children end up there.
“We know almost all children in orphanages, 80 to 90 percent, have living parents. Most often it’s poverty driving these families apart,” said Shannon Senefeld, senior vice president for overseas operations at Catholic Relief Services. “Parents believe or they are told that their child will be given a better way of life if they live in an orphanage.”
HarvestPlus proposed using the $100 million grant to breed seeds for growing hearty, nutrient-rich staple foods to reduce hidden hunger for 100 million people across 17 countries in Africa in the next five years.
The Rice 360 Institute for Global Health said that with its proposal, it aimed to save 500,000 newborns in Africa annually with something it refers to as “NEST,” a suite of low-cost medical technologies and solutions already proven to reduce infant mortality.
The International Rescue Committee and Sesame Workshop have proposed jointly to develop an education curriculum to reach millions of refugee children traumatized and displaced by the conflict in Syria. Many of these children are living in refugee camps or other temporary housing in countries including Lebanon and Jordan.
“Few Syrian children have opportunities to learn and play, some have been exposed to extreme violence, and many are at risk for what’s called toxic stress,” said Sherrie Westin, executive vice president of global impact and philanthropy at Sesame Workshop.
Ms. Westin described the proposal as the “largest early-childhood intervention in the history of humanitarian response.”
MacArthur named eight semifinalist proposals for its $100 million grant challenge in February. The semifinalists that did not advance to the final round are the Carter Center, whose project centered on eliminating river blindness in Nigeria; the Human Diagnosis Project, which proposed connecting 30 million uninsured and underinsured patients virtually with medical specialists; the Himalayan Cataract Project, which wants to eliminate blindness in Ghana, Ethiopia, and Nepal by training community health professionals and delivering low-cost, sight-restoring cataract surgery; and the Internet Archive, which proposed working with brick-and-mortar libraries to create a digital collection of 4 million books to be made accessible to people around the world.
Goal to Ignite Ideas
MacArthur announced the 100&change competition in June 2016, 10 months after its president, Julia Stasch, said the grant maker would put more money toward “big bets” to address things like climate change and deficits in the country’s criminal-justice system. With the $100 million grant, the foundation said it wanted to ignite great ideas for tackling the world’s biggest problems “affecting people, places, or the planet.”
Prize challenges are not unique in philanthropy. Organizations including the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York Community Trust, and the St. Paul Foundation use them to spur solutions to problems and to recognize good work.
Still, the MacArthur effort has drawn widespread attention because of its size.
The competition spurred 1,904 applications, four-fifths of which the foundation received within three days of the deadline last October. Proposals were judged on four main criteria: how meaningful, verifiable, durable, and feasible they are.
MacArthur’s review team eliminated 463 proposals because their budgets fell far short of the $100 million being offered. Others lacked empirical evidence, while in some cases the lead applicants did not sufficiently demonstrate financial transparency, according to the foundation.
