Who is Funding Informal STEM Education?
Three kids play with robotics kits at a table.
Welcome back to our Insights! We’ll be continuing today with another installment in our series examining Dr. Sarah Dunifon’s research on funding priorities and evaluation policies of informal STEM learning funding organizations.
The following content is based on or excerpted from Dr. Dunifon’s dissertation, An Examination of Evaluation Policies and Funding Priorities in Informal STEM Education. The research cited in this piece was conducted between April 2022 and March 2023. You can access the full dissertation here.
In an earlier piece, we profiled the types of organizations supporting informal STEM education (ISE) in the United States. We found ISE funders to mainly be corporate philanthropies, government agencies, and private foundations. Most of these were large organizations with an annual grant-making spend of over $1M.
Now, let’s explore the “who” - here you’ll find our list of 42 funders who were supporting ISE in 2022 (when our research began). We hope it is helpful to all of our friends and followers who serve ISE communities in their important work.
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Amgen Foundation
Arizona Community Foundation
The Boeing Company
BP Foundation
The Brinson Foundation
Broadcom Foundation
Burroughs Wellcome Fund
Chevron Foundation
Cleveland Foundation
Cognizant Foundation
Colocation America
The C.S. Mott Foundation
Dana Foundation
Dow Company Foundation
ExxonMobil Foundation
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
The Grable Foundation
Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)
Intel Foundation
The Lemelson Foundation
Motorola Solutions Foundation
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
National Institutes of Health (NIH)
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Oregon Department of Education
Overdeck Family Foundation
The Pinkerton Foundation
Pisces Foundation
The Qualcomm Foundation
Regeneron Foundation
The Saxena Family Foundation
Science for Society
Simons Foundation
SPIE - the International Society for Optics and Photonics
The Steinman Foundation
STEM Next Opportunity Fund
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)
U.S. Department of Education (ED)
The Verizon Foundation
Westinghouse Charitable Giving Program
Please note: this list is a snapshot of the funding landscape for informal STEM education in 2022, but is certainly not all-encompassing. We may have missed some funders in our landscape review, and others may have taken up these efforts in the last two years. If we missed anyone in our review, or you know of funders doing new work in these spaces, we’d love to hear about them!
References:
Dunifon, S. M. (2024). An examination of evaluation policies and funding priorities in informal STEM education funding organizations (Doctoral dissertation). University of Pittsburgh.
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