The William T. Grant Strategy for Investing in High Quality Research to Reduce Inequality and Improve the Use of Research Evidence in Decision Making That Affects Young People

Inequality by race, ethnicity, economic standing, and immigrant origin status is pervasive in the United States, and, in many ways, has become more extreme in recent decades. This inequality is evident across a range of systems, including the education, child welfare, mental health, and justice systems, and in varied settings, such as neighborhoods, schools, families, and communities. Young people from marginalized backgrounds face increasing barriers to achieve their potential in the academic, social, behavioral, and economic realms. The William T. Grant Foundation contends that the research community can play a critical role in reversing this trend. Toward this end, we support research to identify, build, and test responses to inequality in youth outcomes and opportunities. The Foundation’s objective is to support research that will ultimately result in action to reduce inequality. For example, one current grant uses state administrative data to examine whether the expansion of Medicaid has increased the frequency of children’s dental visits and led to reduced school absences. Another, more exploratory study examines the links between mental health disparities and peer interactions as revealed in daily diaries kept by students. A third example involves a cluster randomized trial focused on the use of research evidence by school-based mental health practitioners and their supervisors to increase youth engagement in mental health services. These examples illustrate the range of studies funded by the William T. Grant Foundation, which include descriptive studies that clarify mechanisms for reducing inequality; intervention studies that assess efforts to reduce inequality; and studies that develop new data or measures to enhance research on reducing inequality.