The New York City-based William T. Grant Foundation has announced seven grants totaling nearly $1.7 million in support of researchers and organizations working to understand and improve the environments in which youth spend their time.

In the category of understanding and improving youth settings, awards announced by the foundation include $450,000 to Robert Roeser, Andrew Mashburn, and Ellen Skinner of Portland State University to evaluate a mindfulness-based stress-reduction program for middle school teachers; $300,000 to Allison Tracy and Linda Charmaraman of Wellesley College for a study of the widely used Afterschool Program Practices Tool (APT), with the goal of improving its assessment reliability; nearly $300,000 to Pamela Morris of New York University, Lisa Gennetian of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Heather Hill of the University of Chicago to study how income instability affects family processes and youth school outcomes; and more than $90,000 to Marc Brackett, Christina Crowe, and Susan Rivers of Yale University to examine the relationship between supportive classroom environments and positive youth development.

In the category of understanding the acquisition, interpretation, and use of research evidence, the foundation awarded $350,000 to Erik Ness and James Hearn of the University of Georgia to investigate the role of intermediaries in conveying research evidence in support of college completion, the ways such evidence is used, and the extent to which policy makers rely on intermediaries; and nearly $215,000 to Fred Wulczyn of the University of Chicago and Lawrence Palinkas of the University of Southern California to study and document whether and how research evidence is used by child welfare agencies to make clinical and administrative decisions.

The foundation also awarded a distinguished fellowship of more than $163,000 to Jeffrey Kaczorowski of the Children's Agenda to study how researchers evaluate program fidelity and outcomes in violence prevention programs for children and youth through an analysis of work by the Children's Institute in Rochester, New York. The institute collaborates with school districts, communities, and government partners to develop programs and conduct rigorous evaluations.

"For the past ten years, my colleagues and I have worked at the intersection of basic and applied science," said Grant Foundation president Robert Granger. "We have followed others who argued that the dichotomy between the two is ill-advised. The best work integrates both goals and these projects succeed in that regard. Given my retirement this August, this is the last cohort of major awards under my presidency. I am very pleased to see how well they simultaneously address questions that are relevant to practice and theory-building."