The Common Good Challenge is a grant competition designed to embrace the idea that society is stronger when people with diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences work together to develop meaningful solutions to complex problems. It will invest $100,000 into three projects that advance dialogue across social, economic, political, racial, and other boundaries to solve specific community challenges.

The Common Good Challenge is seeking teams that are composed of a combination of the following types of people:

• People who live and work in the identified community, and/or who belong to and reflect the identified community;
• People with decision-making authority over the identified challenge;
• People who are closest to the identified challenge in terms of lived experience, professional background, or personal mission;
• People with diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences who are committed to working together to solve a problem.

The Common Good Challenge seeks to counter the breakdown in civic cooperation and civil discourse by fostering a culture of collaboration and working together toward a common goal. Successful proposals will bring together teams of people with diverse (and potentially opposing) viewpoints, and support their pursuit of solutions to issues facing their community. The Common Good Challenge focuses on who is coming together in coalition, rather than focusing on a singular issue. 

You must register no later than Thursday, December 13, 2022 at 5:00 PM Mountain Time. Registration is required and is a simple two-step process. First, create a username and password and then check your inbox to confirm your registration. Next, complete the online registration form. Once you are registered, submit your application online no later than Wednesday, January 18 2023, at 5:00 PM Mountain Time.

Once the submission deadline passes, the Common Good Challenge team will perform an administrative review to confirm each submission meets the rules and application requirements before advancing to the Peer-to-Peer Review.

During Peer-to-Peer Review, each lead applicant will be required to score and comment on five applications from other teams. Top-scoring applications will move on to the Evaluation Panel and will each receive an additional score and comments from five judges. All reviewers will use the scoring rubric, and all scores will be statistically normalized to ensure fairness.

The Arizona Community Foundation will review the top-scoring submissions and request additional information as needed to select six Finalists based on considerations that may include, but are not limited to, Evaluation Panel resulting rank order, organizational capacity, geographic diversity, and feasibility.  Those Finalists will be invited to participate in a pitch event with the Selection Committee in June 2023. That Committee will decide on the three $100,000 award recipients.

We encourage all applicants to include as much evidence and data as possible to demonstrate the likelihood of success of the proposed solution. In the case that it is an early-stage proposal where a proof of concept has not been fully developed or tested, please include data on how a similar project or strategy has worked.