Gates Foundation Awards ProSocial Innovation Grant

We are thrilled to announce that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in partnership with Cannes Lions has awarded ProSocial a prestigious innovation grant as part of the Grand Challenges Explorations (GCE) initaitive. The challenge we have accepted: “Aid is Working. Tell the World.”

The Gates Foundation announced today more than $21 million in new grants through Grand Challenges Explorations. GCE is a tiered granting mechanism that funds innovative ideas to tackle key global health and development problems, and provides additional resources for projects that demonstrate initial promise. Included in today’s announcement is the first group of grantees who were selected, in partnership with Cannes Lions, to identify new ways to communicate that foreign aid is working. ProSocial was one of ten recipients and will have the opportunity to prove success in order to apply for a $1Million follow-up grant from Gates over the next 18 months.

The ten finalists of the first-ever Gates Foundation/Cannes Chimera challenge were selected from 914 entries submitted from 85 countries. The ideas were judged on their own merits, their creators remaining anonymous, by a committee made up of the Cannes Chimera as well as members of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s review board and a small group of experts.

ProSocial’s winning project will employ an innovative, cross-disciplinary, issue-driven creative process to develop an original network television series telling the stories of aid workers around the world, and to use this series as an anchor for a public engagement campaign focusing on the relevance of international aid and its demonstrated record of success.

For a list of the ten grant recipients, click here.

For the full press release from the Gates Foundation, click here.

We could not be more honored to receive this incredible opportunity.