The GO Fund (Grantham Opportunities Fund) enables researchers to obtain funding to develop interesting projects that have a strong cross-disciplinary sustainability focus and are designed to propose practical solutions to complex problems.
The first round resulted in projects across a variety of areas, such as the launch of the Soil Care Network, which unites a community of 200 established and early career scholars from a variety of disciplines who work on soils.
The second round awarded 14 researchers with funding to develop their projects, such as research solutions addressing the challenge of health system resilience for climate change or a ground-breaking workshop that brought together leading scholars from various disciplines within the realm of social sciences. You can read more about the successful projects here.
At the end of 2023, the Grantham Centre announced the third round of the GO Fund for projects with a cross-disciplinary sustainability focus. Typically, such projects will not yet be developed enough for UKRI grant applications. Applications were accepted from ECRs, seasoned researchers, and PhD students, or any combination of those. We are looking for projects that have a realistic prospect of making a contribution and will very likely lead to further work in that space.
We received a high number of applications and we are now no longer accepting any more. Over the coming weeks these will be assessed and all applicants will be notified early in 2024 of the outcome.
Successful applicants will be awarded funding of up to £10,000 which should be spent by 31st December 2024. The funding can be used to cover the arranging of meetings, travel costs, and associated items, but not staff costs or stipend top-ups. Hardware would not normally be an eligible cost. We would not normally fund air travel where there were rail alternatives, and we will not fund projects associated directly with the oil and gas sector, nor the tobacco industry. Priority will be given to those who have not been awarded monies from this fund previously.
The recipients will be required to acknowledge the support of the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures in any papers produced from the work and should submit a final project report by 31st January 2025.
Please note that the Principal Investigator has to be from the University of Sheffield but other collaborators on the project can be from other institutions.