By Amy Ferrer, APA Executive Director
The APA has a longstanding commitment to support—financially and otherwise—efforts to make philosophy more diverse and inclusive. For a number of years the APA has provided small grants through our annual $25,000 grant fund (supported by the Eastern Division), many to programs focusing on diversity: NYSWIP, the California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race, and the Mentoring Project for Pre-Tenure Women Faculty in Philosophy, for example. Other programs have been funded with direct grants from the board, including the 2013 Diversity in Philosophy Conference, the Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute (PIKSI), and the Rutgers Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy. We are very proud of the programs we’ve supported and all that they have achieved, and we want to do more.
To that end, last November, the board of officers decided to open a competition for $20,000 in APA grants to diversity projects in 2015. We know our members are creative, innovative problem-solvers, and we hope that this request for proposals (RFP) will generate many new ideas to improve philosophy’s diversity. In fact, we’ll be looking not only for programs that the APA can fund directly, but also programs that might be good fits for grants from foundations and government organizations, so that we can help get even more initiatives off the ground than our $20,000 will afford.
Opening this RFP meant that, unfortunately, we could not immediately renew our funding of an important diversity initiative, PIKSI, which the APA has been supporting for nearly a decade. I want to take this opportunity to explain the rationale behind that difficult decision.
By the end of 2014, PIKSI will have received nearly $200,000 in grant funding from the APA over the last nine years: the APA’s longest and largest grant ever. We are proud to have supported this valuable program that makes such an impact a critical point in the pipeline.
From the beginning, though, the grant to PIKSI was explicitly intended to be start-up funding, with the expectation that the APA would not provide ongoing, sustaining financial support. This is because the APA is not, primarily, a grantmaking organization; the association’s finances do not permit us to provide continuing funding to any program, no matter how valuable it is to the profession.
So, after careful consideration, the APA board of officers decided in November, on a unanimous vote of all board members in attendance, not to renew the APA’s funding for PIKSI at this time. Instead, the board decided to open the diversity and inclusiveness RFP. We want to support the development of new programs to address philosophy’s diversity problem and expand the breadth of projects taking on this important task. We believe the RFP will encourage program development, and we welcome applications not only from new projects, but also from PIKSI and other existing efforts. We will fund those that we believe will make the biggest impact, whether they are brand new or well established.
At the same time, the board made a commitment, again on a unanimous vote of all present, to work with PIKSI to develop alternative sources of funding and creative funding strategies. Since the board meeting at which these decisions were made, I personally and others in the APA leadership have been in contact with members of the PIKSI board and with grantmaking organizations on PIKSI’s behalf, providing advice and exploring new potential avenues, such as crowdfunding. We intend to continue working closely with PIKSI for years to come.
You might ask, why not just do both—renew PIKSI’s grant and open the new RFP? The board discussed this possibility, but was faced with the unfortunate reality that it just wasn’t in our budget. For several years the APA has spent more than it brought in, leaving us with razor-thin financial margins and very little safety net. I have made and will continue to make every reasonable effort to get the APA on stable footing, and we are now in a much better fiscal situation than we were a couple of years ago. But financial sustainability is and will continue to be a challenge. Through these difficult years, we have continued to make diversity funding a priority, but unfortunately we cannot do as much as we would ideally like given the resources available to us. If it had been possible to double the funding available for diversity projects in 2015, I have little doubt the board would have voted to do so.
All of us at the APA want to do more—more programs, more grants, more advocacy, more scholarship. Right now, we’re stretched very thin, getting all we can out of every dollar. So to do more, we need more.
If you want to help the APA to expand our diversity funding and other efforts, there are several things you can do: (1) become an APA member or renew your membership, if you haven’t already; (2) make a donation to the APA or our Fund for Diversity and Inclusiveness; and (3) urge your colleagues and friends to do the same.
And further, I encourage you to join us in supporting PIKSI’s efforts to seek new funding. Share your ideas. Approach your institution and ask them to support PIKSI. Connect PIKSI with foundation funders or major donors you’re aware of. Help brainstorm creative funding strategies. Together we can do more than the APA can do alone.
[Please note: My appearance on this blog does not constitute an endorsement by the APA of the blog or its content.]
Recent Comments