We’ll be your secret sauce, it’s worked before!
In an effort to make neuroscience education accessible to everyone, we are always keeping our eyes peeled for grant funding opportunities! We are constantly on the lookout for programs we can recommend to teachers and admins who are excited about Neuroscience and STEM, but might not have the funding for right now.
Toshiba America Foundation
The Toshiba America Foundation offers several very generous grant cycles throughout the school year and, as you can see in the tweet above, someone on the Toshiba judging panel is as excited about K12 Neurosci Ed as these students are!
There is a deadline approaching quickly for K-5 grants, and there are several other grants throughout the year (staggered every few months) which offer funding for Middle and High School students.
Lowe’s Toolbox for Education
Lowe’s Toolbox for Education – Awarding up to $5,000 to schools for projects ranging from new gardens to STEM projects, Lowe’s offers generous funding for creative K12 projects of all design.
Maybe Lowe’s Toolbox for Education can help your school win a set of Backyard Brains Toolboxes for Neuroscience!
Due date for submissions is September 28th.
Need help applying to a grant?
You don’t have to go it alone
If you’re looking for help finding or applying for grants, our partners and friends at Ward’s Science have a free grant support service. From finding the grants to writing winning applications, they can help you with the whole process.
Whether you may be looking for help applying to the Toshiba America Foundation grant, starting a Donor’s Choose campaign, or simply need help finding potential grants, the indomitable Rusti Berent of Ward’s Grant Services is ready to help guide you through the process.
And, if you need any more encouragement to reach out to and work with Ward’s Grant Services, know that they’ve helped schools raise over $1 million dollars in grant funding… also, check out this recent, and very relevant, Grant Winner from their Success Stories Page:
- Matthew F., Billerica, MA, Toshiba America Foundation
The Claw
And other “grant bait” neuroscience kits
Is your goal to creatively meet Middle School NGSS, Introduce a Neuroscience Unit to your STEM Class, enhance a PLTW Biomedical Sciences class, or to empower your seniors to do their own Neuroscience Research Projects? We’ve got powerful kits that will throw the door wide open for your students, opening up a world of DIY Neuroscience, Biomedical Engineering, and hands-on Anatomy and Physiology. See a high school success story here!
Check out these kits and more in our store, create your own grant wish-list, request a quote, and get to work!
If you aren’t familiar, Donors Choose is like the Kickstarter for classrooms. Teachers who are hunting for funding to buy classroom supplies, tech, and tools can turn to their communities for support when the school’s budget can’t support them.
This is an awesome opportunity for teachers to bring awareness to issues of classroom funding, to connect their classroom with their communities, and to afford new educational resources to give their students what they deserve! It is also a platform where large corporations and charities turn to find opportunities to support the future leaders of their industries.
Many of the teachers we work with hunt for grants and alternative funding strategies to supplement and enrich their curriculum with the inclusion of our hands-on neuroscience kits. And some, as you will see below in the below example, have found success funding their classrooms on Donors Choose!
Funded: California AVID Classroom
Mr. Gomez set out to enrich his AVID leadership students’ Science classroom with some hands-on biotech earlier this year. He set up his campaign to fund the purchase of a Backyard Brains Toolbox for his classroom, and his words really speak best to the effort:
My Students
Our students are inner city, at-risk students living in between East Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles, a city filled with dreams and filled with life’s harsh reality. Their school and city are contradictions of the truth. It is a location where the imaginary high school show “GLEE” is filmed, but the reality of high school for them is parents that work nights, single-parent households, teen pregnancy and other issues of inner-city youth.
My Project
This is a fun, affordable, hands-on way to experiment with neuroscience. A toolbox full of different types of tools to learn how the brain works. During science class, we never really get to show students the fun side of science because we lack the money to buy fancy equipment. |
|
| Then, a few weeks later, after the project had received partial funding, Mr. Gomez’s project got included in the incredibly generous charitable effort by Ripple, developers of a cryptocurrency, who funded every single project on Donor’s Choose. |
|
OMG!! thank you thank you thank you!!! this is such great news. You have changed so many lives with this donation. I am really lost for words. It is truly the best day of the year. My students and I will be forever thankful and I am usually good at writing thank you letters but I truly am lost for words.
With gratitude,
Teacher Gomez
| Thank you so much for everything you have given my students and I. We will now be able to explore the brain and the science that lies deep within it. Making learning fun is key when one is trying to engagement of a student mind. My student will love this new project, they really wanted to use it when I should them videos of what was coming. We will use these lesson to start exploring how our minds work both physically and sociologically. Which will guide us throw the tunnel of exploring what depression is, how drugs affect our brain and how to have a healthy mind, mindfulness.
With gratitude,
Teacher Gomez |
|
| We are excited to see what Mr. Gomez and his students achieve! He began this school year by introducing his 9th grade students to the resources and, as they learn to use the kits and learn about the neuroscience behind the experiments, they plan to expand the application to other classes soon. |
|
This toolbox contains most all of our core products in one portable box. A Neuron SpikerBox, a Muscle SpikerBox, a Human-Human-Interface, a Manipulator, a RoachScope, a Metal Platform with magnet snaps to keep things tidy, a RoboRoach, and our new Heart and Brain SpikerBox. This ships with 100 Patch Electrodes and all the cables you need. Now do some outreach, make some discoveries, and share your results!
