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Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Ocean Project innovative solutions grant program

Innovative Solutions Grants Program

Thank you to all who applied for our first round of Innovative Solutions grants! Awards for 2014 have been announced. We hope to have a new RFP to share with our partners later in 2014.

Background

The Ocean Project advances ocean conservation in partnership with aquariums, zoos, and museums around the world. In support of our partners, we have been conducting public opinion research since the late 1990s, and have developed a communications research and outreach initiative, with an emphasis on effective communication for conservation. Reports, presentations, and related resources for our partners are available online.

Thanks to funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), The Ocean Project is now able to invest in supporting innovators in the aquarium community, helping them enhance and expand their capacity as leaders for conservation in their communities.

There are two major goals for this initiative:

  • Provide financial, strategic, and technical resources in support of innovative efforts by aquariums to more effectively engage visitors — especially the key audiences of youth and minorities — in meaningful ways for ocean conservation and stewardship. Successful proposals will set out to investigate the effectiveness of one or two strategies for engaging with visitors for conservation action.
  • Leverage the impact of these efforts by encouraging and enabling the peer-to-peer sharing of success stories, including information from The Ocean Project’s ongoing communications research, with the organization’s network of 2,000 ZAMs and other conservation and education organizations across the United States and around the world. Effectively, this means awardees will focus on reporting back to the ZAM community about what they learn from their projects, throughout the grant period.

Initial grants under the program were awarded in January, 2014. A second request for proposals is likely to be released in the fall of 2014.

http://theoceanproject.org/communication-resources/market-research/presentations/