The Common Good Challenge embraces the idea that society is stronger when people with diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences work together to develop meaningful solutions to complex problems.

At a time when significant attention is paid to breakdowns in civil discourse and persistent pressures on our democracy, this competition honors and invests in projects that advance dialogue and cooperation across social, economic, political, racial, and other boundaries to solve specific community challenges.  

The Common Good Challenge aims to incentivize and provide visibility to productive collaborations between teams of people with diverse, and potentially opposing, viewpoints while supporting their pursuit of common ground. This challenge focuses on who is coming together in coalition: diverse teams that are committed to solving complex or persistent issues they have identified within their own communities.

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JOIN US

Three $100,000 prizes will be awarded to teams that:

• Have identified a complex or persistent problem facing their community
• Are bringing a diverse group of individuals/groups together in coalition to develop and/or advance a process and arrive at an intended solution

The Common Good Challenge encourages 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.

STRONG SOLUTIONS FOR THE COMMON GOOD CHALLENGE WILL BE:

Community-Informed: Have deep community roots with authentic stakeholder relationships and a highly coordinated plan to engage with and learn from the community. Will promise transformational impact.  

Feasible: Feature a team of trusted experts and leaders with a remarkable record of, or potential for, delivering results. Will present a comprehensive, community-informed budget and plan.  

Collaborative: Convene an inspirational team with unified values who are exceptionally prepared for success. Will show a remarkable history of, or potential for, community engagement. 

Impactful: Illustrate a powerful and compelling solution to address a crucial community issue that will result in a lasting, transformational change. Will present a robust plan to measure results.

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PITCH EVENT & AWARDS

All valid submissions will participate in the Peer-to-Peer review process, and will score and comment on five other applications using the scoring rubric (scores are normalized for fairness). The Peer-to-Peer review will result in a rank order of all valid submissions.  

Based on the rank order of scores, a subset of top-scoring applications will move forward to the Evaluation Panel. Valid submissions will receive a set of normalized scores from five of our Evaluation Panel judges, as well as valuable feedback that could be used to strengthen and refine the solution as the team seeks to secure other funding sources.

Once a rank order of results from the Evaluation Panel has been calculated, the Arizona Community Foundation will select six Finalists with consideration given to  organizational capacity, geographic diversity, and feasibility. These Finalists will have the opportunity to strengthen their proposals and present their solution to the Selection Committee in June 2023. More details to come.

The $300,000 in total prize dollars will be dispersed as three awards of $100,000 to three winning teams.

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QUESTIONS

The Common Good Challenge team will host Q&A webinars leading up to registration and submission deadlines. Information about how to sign up will be emailed to those who registered for the challenge and will be available on the News & Updates page of this site.

In the meantime, please email us to request more information regarding eligibility, requirements, and other prize-related questions.