For more information about applying for a 2025 Award:
Columbia World Projects works to catalyze innovations and accelerate impact in the U.S. and around the world across four themes: Supporting Generations, Renewing Democracy, Building Inclusive Cities, and Enabling Thriving Communities. For the 2025 Social Impact Awards, we seek proposals with bold ideas to advance inclusive cities.
Cities are densely settled areas of prosperity and, simultaneously, immense inequality. They also are locations of experimentation to build opportunity, drive community growth, and innovate policy. CWP has worked in this domain since it’s inception – assembling networks of faculty, practitioners, and policymakers – tackling issues ranging from rebuilding Beirut following the 2020 port explosion, to supporting work using big data to assess correlations between urban mobility and opportunity, to scholarly efforts that prompt new thinking on prospects for developing green infrastructure in cities.
We invite proposals that seek to mobilize university capacities to examine and address the challenges faced by cities around the world. Proposals on this theme may focus on a range of disciplines, topics and strategies. Examples include but are not limited to:
- Public Art and Cultural Heritage in Urban Spaces
- Cultural Preservation and Development in Urban Communities
- Sustainable Green Infrastructure in Cities
- Technology for Urban Mobility and Accessibility
- Equitable Healthcare Access/Infrastructure in Urban Areas
- Education Equity and Opportunity
- Data-Driven Urban Policy Solutions for Reducing Inequalities
- Inclusive Economic Development and Social Entrepreneurship in Cities
- Innovative Urban Governance for Participation and Social Justice
- Affordable Housing and Equitable Land Use Law
- Urban Resilience and Climate Adaptation
- Digital Equity and Smart Cities
- Urban Design Innovations
Award Categories
Social Impact awards will be made in the following two categories: Seed Awards and Impact Awards.
- Seed Award (3-5 awards; $10,000 - $20,000 each; over one year): These awards provide funding to support faculty and researchers in the pursuit of novel ideas for addressing urban challenges, advancing strategies and policies through support for scholarly pursuits, convenings, or small projects that examine and advance solutions.
- Impact Award Category A (2-3 awards; $150,000 - $250,000 each; over two to three years): These awards aim to support projects that build on early-stage work by piloting and implementing innovative interventions to critical urban issues. These awards may fund pilot projects, testing interventions in diverse settings and expanding successful prototypes.
- Impact Award Category B (up to one $500,000 award; over two to three years): These awards will support larger-scale projects aiming to address priority urban challenges through innovative, practical solutions or change in policy.