The National Geographic Society is accepting pre-applications Level I and Level II grants for the Spatial Thinking: Inspiring Action with Place-Based Solutions. Understanding our world starts with place and space — everything happens somewhere. Spatial thinking involves visualizing, interpreting, and reasoning information using location, patterns, scale, relationships, movement, and change over time in order to understand our world and develop impactful solutions relevant to a place and its unique conditions for those who live there. It is much more than the ability to create, use and understand maps. We continue to face big, complex, and rapidly changing challenges such as climate adaptation and mitigation, water scarcity, biodiversity conservation, and preserving and better understanding cultural knowledge and human stories. Spatial thinking is a powerful tool for understanding and telling stories of the past and present of a place and its inhabitants. It can help us understand a place’s unique conditions, how people and our planet relate to those conditions, and create and implement solutions needed to address challenges of a place.
This funding opportunity supports projects that identify a challenge related to a specific place and its unique conditions and leverages an educational solution using spatial thinking to enable people to act on behalf of our planet and its people.
Submissions should describe projects that are co-developed with members of a community or developed by community(ies) that will be impacted, or provide a detailed justification of that omission. We are particularly interested in projects that make connections across disciplines to identify creative solutions through interdisciplinary methods, use experiential learning, and define spatial thinking broadly, which could include tools such as geospatial technologies, maps, data, inquiry-based learning, or innovative technologies or tools (on the low to high tech spectrum) to engage learners (of any age, in any setting) in framing and visualizing data to develop solutions to challenges.
Application Deadline: Pre-applications are due by Monday, May 5, 2025 at 11:59 PM EDT.
