• STRENGTH IN PARTNERSHIP

FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES

The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy supports UCLA scholars who undertake collective work related to at least one of the Institute’s research themes. Products should demonstrate an explicit public orientation, i.e. an intent of speaking to public issues and/or addressing audiences that lie beyond the university. The Institute is especially interested in projects that organize knowledge to challenge inequality, be it by questioning established academic wisdom, contributing to public debate, or impacting policy decisions.

  • Application deadline: Monday, May 20, 2024 at 5pm PT.
  • Funding decision: June. Funds available for use beginning in July 2024.
  • Award amount: Up to $500.

The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy invites applications from UCLA graduate students for grants to support research related to the Institute’s key research themes:

ELIGIBILITY: Registered UCLA graduate students in good standing. Each working group must be comprised of at least three (3) graduate students, with one student identified as the key contact for the group.

CRITERIA: Applications must address one or more of the following criteria:

  1. Graduate student working groups to undertake a year-long plan of collective work related to one of the research priorities of the Institute. Given the scope and purpose of the Institute, we are especially interested in projects that organize knowledge to challenge inequality, be it by questioning established academic wisdom, or contributing to public debate, or having an impact on a policy decision.
  2. Organization of mutual aid and volunteer efforts to support communities in the Los Angeles metropolitan region, such as informal sector workers, undocumented immigrants, unhoused neighbors, rent-burdened tenants, system-impacted people, and UCLA students experiencing precarity and insecurity.
  3. Development of formats of public scholarship that allow distribution or dissemination of work to relevant audiences. We welcome a variety of formats, including the development of curriculum and pedagogy, artistic performance, creative writing, opinion pieces, and social science peer-reviewed publications.

PROPOSAL: Please submit a short proposal (not to exceed 500 words) explaining the focus of the student working group, describe the project the group will take on, and list the final deliverables. For returning applicants, please include what you plan to do with additional funding this year.

AWARDS: Successful proposals may be funded in full or in part at the discretion of the review committee. Funding will be for one year with the possibility of renewal through a new proposal competition next year. Projects that are selected must acknowledge the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy on all collateral, public information materials, social media, and publications resulting from the award.

Apply for UCLA Graduate Student Working Groups
  • Application deadline: Friday, May 31, 2024 at 5pm PT.
  • Funding decision: June 2024. Funds available for use beginning in July 2024 and must be expended by May 31, 2025.
  • Award amount: 2-3 awards up to $10,000 each.

The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy invites proposals from UCLA faculty for grants to support research or a faculty working group related to the Institute’s key research themes:

ELIGIBILITY:
All UCLA Academic Senate and Non-Senate faculty are eligible. Faculty may apply for seed grants to fund research or to support a faculty working group. If applying for a research seed grant, faculty are eligible either on an individual basis or as a team. If applying for a working group, each working group must be comprised of at least three (3) faculty. In the case of any group applications for either a research seed grant or a faculty working group, a lead researcher must be identified. Faculty with current grants from the Institute who wish to apply must clearly demonstrate how additional funding will be used to expand and/or deepen the research and its impacts.

PRIORITIES:
The following are priorities with regards to proposal review:

  1. Organizing knowledge to challenge inequality is the Institute’s mandate and with this in mind, research that advances critical thinking or that can make a decisive conceptual contribution to a topic, are welcome. We are especially interested in research, scholarship that demonstrates how “organizing knowledge” can challenge established academic wisdom, contribute to public debate, and/or build power for communities and movements.
  2. We are keen to support research and/or projects that are developed in close partnership with movement-based scholars and community organizations. In such cases, we ask that you provide us with a detailed explanation of your alliance and work with the relevant movement or organization and how this project will strengthen that alliance.
  3. Whether the research is located in a single neighborhood or concerned with translocal networks, we aim to highlight the global forces that might be at work in processes of displacement and dispossession and the struggles at hand. We encourage research that has an expansive socio-spatial imagination, be it located in global Los Angeles or elsewhere in the world.
  4. We share research with multiple academic and public audiences. Please consider the genres and formats through which you share your work, be it a field-defining syllabus, an opinion piece, public program, creative work, or social science peer-reviewed publications.

GRANT REQUIREMENTS:
Research funds must be expended by May 31, 2025. Any remaining funds will be recalled. Grantees are expected to provide the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy with a project summary and 2-3 images in Summer 2025. Projects that receive grants must acknowledge the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy in all programs, public information materials, social media, and publications resulting from the grant.

PROPOSAL:
Please submit a research proposal (not to exceed two pages, double-spaced) outlining the key research questions and contributions of the project. While we are not looking for an elaborate proposal and/or research design, we would like to understand the methodologies you plan to use in such research and how these are aligned with the theoretical and conceptual stakes of the work. The proposal should address the themes and priorities listed in this call. Faculty working groups are expected to be collective endeavors with the intent of exploring a shared field of inquiry. Working group proposals should explain the purpose of the working group and its projected activities (for example, meetings, speakers, reading circles and so forth). In addition, please submit a budget and a short two-page CV for each of the faculty researchers involved in the project. See previously funded faculty research projects here.

>>Please also review the Mellon Foundation Scholar-in-Community Seed Grant opportunity. Faculty are asked to apply for either the Mellon Foundation Scholar-in-Community seed grant or the UCLA Faculty Seed Grants & Working Groups opportunity, but not both.

Apply for UCLA Faculty Seed Grants & Working Groups
  • Application deadline: Friday, May 31, 2024 at 5pm PT.
  • Funding decision: June 2024. Funds available for use beginning in July 2024 and must be expended by May 31, 2025.
  • Award amount: $6,000 seed grant split between Scholar-in-Community and Community Partner.
    • – One payment for faculty or doctoral student/Scholar-in-Community – $3,000
    • – One payment for Community Partner – $3,000*

    *Community partner must be a designated 501(c)(3), or have a fiscal sponsor who is a designated 501(c)(3), and will be required to register as a UC vendor via PaymentWorks in order to receive the one-time $3,000 stipend.

As part of the Mellon Foundation’s inaugural higher learning open call on Race and Racialization in the United States, the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy invites proposals from UCLA faculty and doctoral students for grants to support research that is in close collaboration with a movement-based or community-based organization around topics broadly conceived as housing and land. This opportunity is part of the “Housing the Third Reconstruction” project (PI Ananya Roy/co-PI Robin D.G. Kelley) where the aim is to bring together university and movement-based scholars in a multi-year research endeavor that is concerned with the conditions and possibilities of emancipatory housing and land. This seed grant intends to provide the opportunity for UCLA faculty and doctoral students to be in residence at a community-based organization to generate and contribute to an inter-institutional space of what is envisioned as fugitive scholarship. It is important that proposals be rooted in an infrastructure of collaboration that ensures a terrain of humanistic inquiry shared by both university-based and movement-based scholars.

The Institute invites applications from UCLA faculty members and doctoral students who either have already established longstanding relationships with a community-based partner, or who are interested in the opportunity to deepen or build a relationship with a community-based partner.

ELIGIBILITY:
All UCLA Academic Senate and Non-Senate faculty and doctoral students who are in good standing are eligible to apply either on an individual basis or as a team. In the case of the latter, the application must indicate a lead researcher.

The community-based partner must be a designated 501(c)(3) organization, or have a fiscal sponsor who has 501(c)(3) status. If awarded, the community-based partner or their fiscal sponsor, will be required to register as a UC vendor via PaymentWorks to receive the one-time stipend of $3,000.

PROPOSAL:
Please submit a research proposal (not to exceed two pages, double-spaced) outlining the key research questions and contributions of the project. While we are not looking for an elaborate research design, we would like to understand the methodologies you plan to use in such research, the theoretical and conceptual stakes of the work, as well as how the proposed project aligns with the mission and goals of the community-based partner. The proposal should address the remaking of the relationship between universities and communities. In addition, please submit a budget overview and a short two-page CV for each of the faculty or doctoral researcher(s) involved in the project.

Please also include a letter from the community-based partner on its organization’s letterhead that states their understanding that the UCLA-based scholar will be in residence to collaborate on the named proposal. Please also have them describe the nature of the relationship between the organization and the UCLA-based scholar (i.e. new or longstanding, any relevant context), as well as a primary contact at the organization for the purposes of the one-time payment (i.e. name, title, email address). This can be a simple paragraph or two.

GRANT REQUIREMENTS:
Research funds transferred to the faculty member or doctoral student must be expended by May 31, 2024. Any remaining funds will be recalled. The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy will work directly with the community-based partner to distribute the one-time stipend. Grantees are expected to provide the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy with a project summary and 2-3 images in Summer 2024. Projects that receive grants must acknowledge the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy in all programs, public information materials, social media, and publications resulting from the grant.

>>Please also review the UCLA Faculty Seed Grants & Working Groups opportunity. Faculty are asked to apply for either the Mellon Foundation Scholar-in-Community seed grant or the UCLA Faculty Seed Grants & Working Groups, but not both.

Apply for Mellon Foundation Scholar-in-Community
  • Application deadline: Applications closed on Thursday, November 2 at 5pm PT.
  • Selection decision: By the end of December 2023.

Program overview:

The UCLA Activist-in-Residence program seeks to strengthen the infrastructure of social transformation by supporting local movement leaders, community organizers, and artists with university resources. Conceptualized as a sabbatical, the residency allows for time and space to reflect upon complex challenges, envision new campaigns and projects, and connect with university faculty, students, and staff.

It is our objective to “turn the university inside out” and invite artists, community organizers, and movement leaders to undertake power-shifting scholarship and pedagogy focused on social change. This program provides opportunities for activists to engage with the UCLA community to develop and strengthen their capabilities, work, and commitment towards social, racial, spatial, and gender justice.

The residency takes place annually from January through May. Each activist will hold a part-time UCLA appointment, receive a gross salary of $7,500 over the five-month period, and may also receive up to $2,500 in research support in the form of reimbursement for allowable expenses through campus purchasing. In addition, activists will have shared office space and paid parking. This residency does not include benefits.

Five (5) activists for the 2024 UCLA Activist-in-Residence Program will be selected: one (2) for the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, one (1) for the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, one (1) for cityLAB-UCLA, one (1) for the UCLA Center for the Study of Women|Barbra Streisand Center. Interested individuals may apply to only one of the following fellowships:

UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy: The Activist-in-Residence program has been an integral part of the Institute since its inception and seeks to further the Institute’s mission of organizing knowledge to challenge inequality. Supported by a gift from the James Irvine Foundation, the residency provides activists with university resources to undertake a self-directed project intended to expand and build the movements and projects with which they are involved and to build and deepen ties with the UCLA community. We invite applicants whose work is directly related to one or more of the Institute’s core research themes: Housing Justice; Future of Finance; Sanctuary Spaces; Climate Justice.

UCLA Asian American Studies Center: This residency is made possible through the Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee Endowment in Social Justice and Immigration Studies. The activist will work on a project of their choice that addresses social inequality in Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. The selection committee will give preference to those whose work is connected to a movement, campaign, or organization. Applicants are also encouraged to participate in a variety of events, such as presentations, class visits, workshops, panels, activist projects, video projects, and Center meetings.

cityLAB-UCLA: Activists will work on a self-directed project that engages spatial justice in the built environment. Preference will be given to activists whose work intersects with one of cityLAB’s research themes (reimagining housing; inclusive public space; redressing spatial inequality) and/or creates a design or public arts intervention. The selected activist will be welcomed to contribute to cityLAB activities including seminars, workshops, site visits, exhibitions and jury reviews, ongoing projects, and team social events. This residency is made possible by the UCLA Public Impact Research Award, and is based in the Architecture & Urban Design Department.

UCLA Center for the Study of Women|Barbra Streisand Center: CSW|Streisand Center looks forward to welcoming their inaugural UCLA Activist-in-Residence. The residency provides activists with university resources to undertake a self-directed project intended to expand and build the movements and projects with which they are involved and to build and deepen ties with the UCLA community. The CSW|Streisand Center-based activist will work on a project that directly addresses issues pertaining to gender and sexuality from a social justice feminist perspective. Preference will be given to activists whose work intersects in a broad sense with one of CSW|Streisand Center’s current priority topics: prison abolition, reproductive justice, transgender rights and advocacy, Black feminism, and environmental justice. However, applications on other topics are welcome as well. The selected activist will be welcomed to contribute to CSW|Streisand Center activities including seminars, workshops, ongoing projects, and team social events.

Goals:

  • Provide movement leaders, community organizers, and artists with the opportunity to undertake power-shifting scholarship, reflect upon complex challenges, and envision new campaigns and projects.
  • Build an inter-institutional space connecting UCLA to social movements and community organizations.
  • Encourage mutual learning and shared pedagogy between activists, students, and scholars that create new models of public scholarship and community engagement.

Eligibility criteria:

  • Be 18 years or older.
  • Live and work in the Los Angeles region.
  • Currently hold a leadership position at a community organization or organize with a social movement that advances social, racial, spatial, and/or gender justice.
  • Be available to be present at UCLA at least 2 days per week during the residency period (January – May). If selected, a letter from your current employer acknowledging the residency will be requested.
  • Attend monthly AIR cohort meetings.
  • Be comfortable with an English-speaking environment for the residency.
  • Current UCLA students and/or employees are NOT eligible to apply.
  • Previous activists-in-residence are ineligible to apply.

COVID-19 requirements:

This residency is subject to UCLA COVID-19 rules and protocols. In keeping with these rules and protocols, UCLA Activists-in-Residence will be required to comply with vaccination and booster requirements and submit proof to UCLA as needed. Activists-in-Residence are also expected to comply with all symptom monitoring, testing, and masking mandates as they are issued by UCLA. For a complete list of current campus protocols addressing COVID-19 prevention, vaccines, testing, exposure management, and isolation/quarantine, visit UCLA COVID Protocols.

Important note:

A limited appointment is viewed as an employee of the university and UC policy SB 1467 strictly prohibits all former UC employees from being set up as a UC vendor for a period of two (2) years from the date of separation. This means that when the Activist-in-Residence appointment comes to an end, the individual will be ineligible to receive any payments from any UC campus as either a vendor or as an independent contractor for a duration of two (2) years. Types of unallowable payments include honoraria, guest speaker fees, consultant fees, etc.

  • Application deadline: Applications closed on Monday, November 6 at 5pm PT.
  • Funding decision: End of Fall Quarter and funds will be available for use in January 2024.
  • Award amount: 3 awards in the amount of $10,000 each.

The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy is pleased to announce the second round of the Ideas and Organizing Doctoral Awards. Doctoral students often note that academic institutions overlook, or even devalorize, their involvement in social and racial justice movements. This award is intended to serve as a counterpoint and will support three (3) UCLA doctoral students whose work exemplifies social justice scholarship and research justice. We invite applications from registered UCLA doctoral students across all disciplines whose research aligns with at least one of the Institute’s key themes: Housing Justice; Future of Finance; Sanctuary Spaces; Climate Justice.

Criteria:

  • Applicant must be registered and in good standing in a doctoral program at UCLA during the quarters when the application is due and when award payment is made
  • Applicant’s teaching and research must center on at least one of the following research themes: Housing Justice; Future of Finance; Sanctuary Spaces; Climate Justice
  • Those who have participated in shared research and organizing with movement-based scholars and organizations are encouraged to apply

Important note:

Applicants who receive financial aid are advised to consult with their Graduate Advisor and the Financial Aid Office about the potential effects of this award on their financial aid package.

  • Application deadline: Applications closed on Friday, December 15, 2023 at 5:00pm PT.
  • Funding decision: Mid-January 2024.
  • Award amount: Up to $5,000.

The Institute is offering the Graduate Research Grant application for UCLA Luskin students’ research and capstone projects. This application is jointly offered by the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS), Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, and the Luskin Center for Innovation. Each center funds projects that fit within its respective research priority areas. The Institute will be looking to support research that aligns with at least one of its key research themes:

  • Housing Justice – Acutely aware of the dispossession and displacement wrought by structures of global racial capitalism, our research insists upon housing justice. Thinking from Los Angeles, as well as other key global nodes of struggle, we expose the modes of capitalist ownership and state-owned violence that produce housing insecurity. Taking our cue from movements led by those excluded from regimes of property ownership, we seek to enact a radical rethinking of housing from financialized commodity to reparative public good.
  • Future of Finance – In the United States, working-class and middle-class households are burdened with pervasive debt to pay for basic needs, from health to education.  Our research situates debt in the global context of predatory financialization and shows how debt works as a form of economic extraction. Our intent is to build platforms of knowledge and action that expose and dismantle debt peonage.
  • Sanctuary Spaces – Situated at the present historical moment of resurgent white nationalism and xenophobia, Sanctuary Spaces, is concerned with the place of racial others–the border-crosser, the asylum-seeker, the refugee–in liberal democracy. With a critical lens around histories of colonial dispossession and racial capitalism, the project thinks across Europe and the U.S. to interrogate Western humanism and foreground alternative frameworks of freedom and justice.
  • Climate Justice – As the climate crisis intensifies, cities around the world are making ambitious plans to mitigate its causes and adapt to its impacts. Too often, these plans neglect marginalized urban residents, or threaten to displace those in vulnerable places. We look to how climate justice organizers have built a global movement from community-based struggles, and conduct research to envision transformative and just ways to plan for climate change.
  • Application deadline: Applications closed on Sunday, December 10 at 5pm PT.
  • Application decision: Friday, March 1, 2024.
  • In-person Freedom School dates: July 14 – July 20, 2024.

The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, as part of its Housing the Third Reconstruction endeavor, invites applications for participation in its Freedom School 2024. With the theme of Insurgent Ground: Land, Housing, Property, this convening aims to bring together movement and university-based scholars actively engaged in insurgent research and critical theorization as a part of, or as accompaniment to, freedom movements.

Objectives

Intended as inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of emancipatory land and housing, this Freedom School will take up the following issues and questions:

  • What is the present historical conjuncture of global racial capitalism and the attendant political economy and ideology of land and real-estate?
  • How are movements undertaking land struggle, dismantling police-property relations, enacting housing and spatial justice?
  • How do we learn from “beautiful experiments” of reconstruction, rematriation, reparation, and decolonization that are or have been underway and how might we organize towards such futurities? In the wake of mass protest movements that reveal possible futures while failing to materialize their aspirations, how can collective liberatory work learn from its recent and distant pasts in order to realize the world we imagine?
  • What are the ontologies of radical relationality, including kinship, presence, solidarity, and community, that are being created to counter social death and state-organized abandonment?

Principles

In pursuing such inquiry, the Freedom School will be guided by the following principles:

  • To take up and learn from knowledge produced by freedom movements, not as case-study, but as foundational epistemology.
  • To commit to critical theorization and historical reflection, including clear-eyed auto-critique of struggle in which participants have directly engaged.
  • To demonstrate accountability to communities and movements on the frontlines of displacement and dispossession.
  • To understand and mobilize the power of research and scholarship while being clear-eyed about knowledge-producing institutions, including the elite university, as sites of struggle.
  • To learn and think from Los Angeles as a (post)colony, situating the U.S. as an empire-state within a world of landless and poor people’s movements.

Logistics

Freedom School 2024 will take place at the University of California, Los Angeles, from July 14, 2024 – July 20, 2024. Participants are expected to attend in person and will be responsible for their travel, accommodation, and meals with a modest stipend of $500 provided by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy towards such costs. Individuals will be required to register as a UC vendor via PaymentWorks in order to receive the one-time $500 stipend and it will be considered taxable income. Attendees from outside of the U.S. who are not a citizen of the U.S., nor a Permanent Resident, will be required to additionally go through the GLACIER process in order to receive the one-time $500 stipend. Freedom School sessions will take place throughout the day with events and group work in the evenings. Participants must also commit to undertaking a collective scholarship project which will be initiated during the Freedom School. A small number of assignments related to the collective scholarship project will be expected to be completed in advance of the in-person gathering, in addition to completing the group project in the weeks following the convening.

Housing the Third Reconstruction is led by Ananya Roy, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Annie Powers, managed by Kristy Lovich and Marisa Lemorande, and guided by an advisory board with Henry Michael Apodaca, Damien Goodmon, Hamid Khan, Tracy Rosenthal, Charles Sepulveda, and Leonardo Vilchis. It is supported by a Mellon Foundation Higher Learning grant.

Incomplete and late applications will not be given consideration. We welcome applicants who are based in Los Angeles, but especially those from other nodes of struggle in the world.

All questions should be directed to: challengeinequality@luskin.ucla.edu

GIVING OPPORTUNITIES

We challenge inequality by focusing on the following priorities: housing justice, future of finance, sanctuary spaces, and climate justice. In response to these key themes, we are seeing tremendous organizing and inspiring activism. We are committed to leveraging the university’s intellectual assets and activities in alliance with social movements and community-based organizations. Through these partnerships we aim for our research to shape and support racial, social, and economic justice.

If we do not create a community and a world where equal opportunity, justice, and an active regard for the environment is the rule, then no act of technological genius will matter because the likelihood is that some of us, or most of us, will be denied the enjoyment of the wonderments of this planet and the gifts of science.

-Meyer Luskin

The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, its genesis, and its future, reflect the vision, dedication, and hard work of many people. A generous gift by Renee and Meyer Luskin made the first idea for the Institute possible. But we also rely on grants and philanthropic gifts to ensure the sustainability of many of our projects and programs. We invite you to join us.

Support the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy