This year, for the third year in a row, we conducted 2 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. We received 50 proposals to review during the Spring, which was a record for us until our Fall Review topped it. To ensure we could provide helpful and candid feedback to each submission, we onboarded 100 new evaluators, bringing the total number of evaluators on our committee to over 300. Over the Summer and Fall we would recruit an additional 100 evaluators to end the year with over 400 in our database.

This Fall, we reviewed 88 proposals. We delivered thousands of pages of personalized feedback from our evaluation committee and also included standard feedback on targeting foundations from our friends at CANDID, plus tips for crowdfunding supplied by Kickstarter. The round was particularly large because of our partnership with the SOLVE Challenge at MIT.

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, we 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.

Click here to read our post about the partnership and learn about some of the non-selected finalists from this year’s SOLVE competition. 

You can also learn about the SOLVE winners here.

We will continue free review to programs that have submitted previously. To encourage repeat submissions and celebrate the hard work done by the unfunded we have come to know best, this Spring we recognized 4 programs that have each made multiple submissions to our program. We are honored to continue to feature them  below until the next List update this Spring. 

Submit by 03/01/2020 for feedback and a chance at the 2020 List by clicking here.