The Unfunded List provides feedback and advice to social change ideas that are in pursuit of funding. We do this through two calls for submissions; once in the spring and once in the fall. All proposals submitted receive helpful feedback, but only those that make the greatest impression on our Evaluation Committee make our twice annual Unfunded List.
This year, for the third year in a row, we conducted two rounds of review for proposals from all over the world. Most were originally submitted to foundations or major grant competitions, but we also reviewed USAID proposals, business plans, one-pagers, and concept notes.
Your proposal or idea could be featured on our official List if you submit it to Unfunded List for feedback from our Evaluation Committee. You will receive feedback and advice that can help your organization or mission, and have the possibility of being featured on our official List of underfunded ideas that deserve attention and recognition.
You can also join our Evaluation Committee to give feedback and advice to other proposals and hone your skills and knowledge of the philanthropy world in our Library of Philanthropy Education.
We reviewed 88 proposals this fall, which broke the record we set a few months prior during the spring round of submissions. We delivered thousands of pages of personalized feedback to the submissions from our evaluation committee and also included standard feedback on targeting foundations from our friends at CANDID, plus crowdfunding tips supplied by Kickstarter.
This round was particularly large because of our partnership with the SOLVE Challenge at MIT. We call it Co-Review, which allows applicants to the MIT SOLVE Challenge to opt-in for feedback from our Evaluation Committee. This process is beneficial to the applicants, MIT SOLVE and our Evaluation Committee.
MIT Solve advances lasting solutions from tech entrepreneurs to address the world’s most pressing problems. Solve is a marketplace for social impact innovation: we find tech entrepreneurs from around the world and broker partnerships across our community to scale their innovative work—driving lasting, transformational change.
In the last two years, thanks to its partners, Solve has brokered commitments of over $12 million in funding for Solver teams and entrepreneurs.
The partnership with MIT was exciting and took us from MIT’s campus on the banks of the Charles River to the halls of the United Nations during General Assembly week (UNGA). Most of the time though, was spent quietly and independently reviewing the 60 finalists from MIT’s innovation social change competition. 32 of the Finalists were selected as SOLVERs and so, in true Unfunded List fashion, we are pleased to give an honorable mention to some of their non-selected finalist organizations.
These non-selected proposals were among the 60 finalists chosen out of 4400 submissions to travel to New York City to pitch, but were ultimately not selected by the SOLVE judges who had difficult decisions to make. The day after the pitch competition, we met with many of these folks personally, having read their proposals and all of the feedback they received. We are confident that these proposals will be improved and that their future efforts will have great success and impact.
For the Fall 2019 Unfunded List, we decided to highlight some of the non-selected finalists from this year’s SOLVE competition. You can read more about the partnership and learn about some of these finalists by visiting our detailed write up about the program.
