Social Innovation and Impact Seed Grants

The Illinois Innovation Network’s Social Innovation and Impact Seed Grants are intended to provide seed funding for social innovation projects that translate research into activities that directly affect lives, address complex social problems, build trusted partnerships in the community, demonstrate longer-term engagement or depth of engagement, and are scalable or replicable.

Spring 2024 Funding Opportunity

Funded Projects

The Social Innovation and Impact Seed Grants program has awarded funding to three projects. Summaries of those projects are below:

Winter 2024 | News release

Journeys to Justice: Commemorating and Memorializing the History and Legacy of Anti-Black Terror in Illinois
Devin Hunter, associate professor of history, University of Illinois Springfield (UIS); Lesa Johnson, associate professor of sociology and anthropology, UIS; Tandra Taylor, assistant professor of history, SIUE; Peter Cole, professor of history, Western Illinois University.

Summer 2023 | News release

What’s Left Behind? A Documentary About African American Mothers on the South Side of Chicago Who Have Lost Children to Gun Violence
Ruby Mendenhall, professor of sociology and African American studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC); Lisa Butler, CEO, herVoice Films, Inc.

Grant Development Capacity Building and Technical Assistance
Courtney Breckenridge, research fellow, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE); Diane Cox, director of grant development, SIUE; Maggie Ervin, specialist of alternative credentials and credit, SIUE; Natalie Whitman, coordinator of alternative credit and credentials, SIUE.