Foundations making grants in public safety, juvenile justice, community resilience, and indigenous community development face a consistent challenge: the evidence base they rely on to evaluate grant proposals was built in continental environments, by researchers who have never worked in island communities, and calibrated on populations that do not include Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, or small island nation communities in meaningful numbers.
When a foundation program officer reviews a proposal for a juvenile justice intervention program targeting Native Hawaiian youth, they are evaluating it against research that was predominantly conducted with Black and Latino youth in urban continental environments. The intervention may work in those contexts. Whether it works in a Native Hawaiian community context — where extended family accountability structures, cultural communication norms, and geographic constraints create a fundamentally different intervention environment — is a question the evidence base cannot answer.
This is the gap ISPI fills for foundation grantmakers. ISPI commissions from foundations are typically policy briefs or research reports that build island-specific evidence bases for specific grantmaking priority areas.
What foundation commissions from ISPI produce
A foundation commissioning ISPI for a Policy Brief on juvenile justice interventions for Native Hawaiian youth receives a 6-10 page document that synthesizes the available research, identifies which evidence-based interventions have demonstrated effectiveness in Pacific Island and Native Hawaiian community contexts specifically, and provides a framework for evaluating grant proposals that accounts for island-specific implementation constraints. That brief becomes the foundation's internal tool for making better grants — and an external signal of the foundation's commitment to evidence-based, culturally grounded grantmaking.
ISPI's at-risk youth and juvenile justice research covers Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities specifically. ISPI's emergency preparedness research addresses community resilience for island communities that foundation disaster relief and resilience programs increasingly fund. ISPI's law enforcement workforce research supports foundations funding criminal justice reform and public safety workforce development in Hawaii and the Pacific.
Foundations with grantmaking programs in Hawaii, the Pacific, the Caribbean, or any island or coastal community context are invited to contact ISPI to discuss how commissioned research can strengthen their grantmaking. Contact: ISPIGlobal@proton.me.