When: Ongoing
Where: The Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground
What: The Common Ground Grant funds individual students as well as student organizations interested in creating opportunities for cross-racial, cross-cultural, and cross-identity gatherings. The HTC looks for ideas aligned with Howard Thurman’s Common Ground philosophy, that meaningful and creative shared experiences can break barriers between people.
Note: Proposed activities and events do not need to be tied to a current organization’s mission or initiatives.
Proposal Guidelines:
- Intended focus. Proposals should focus on involving multiple organizations or groups of students and an activity unrelated to any one group’s mission. It should be intuitive to where all parties can interact, not about fulfilling any one’s group agenda.
- Fostering collaboration and interaction. Whether the collaboration is among existing groups or it is an effort to generate new collaboration, the goal of this grant is to prioritize efforts aimed at strengthening cross-racial, cross-cultural, and cross-identity conversations and interactions.
- Potential for impact. Priority will be given to proposals that explicitly articulate the activity’s intended impact for BU communities and plan of execution. The committee looks most positively upon proposals that effectively answer the following questions: a) who do you plan to meet or encounter with your activity? b) how does the activity facilitate substantive interactions and conversations? and, c) what do you hope is the follow up?
- New initiatives. After the event or program has been funded, priority will be given to funding other new initiatives.
Deadlines:
Common Ground Grant proposals will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Applications should be submitted no later than one month prior to the activity and the staff will only consider programs for the current or next academic semester.
Got questions on the process? Contact Caron Camille at caronca@bu.edu.