Our Purpose
Templeton World Charity Foundation catalyzes discovery and accelerates progress in the spiritual search for meaning, purpose, and truth. We promote scientific findings and religious exploration to inspire new perspectives on life’s deepest questions.
Core Funding Areas
These Core Funding Areas form the cornerstones of the Templeton World Charity Foundation’s grantmaking.
To learn more about these areas, click on any of the links below:
Understanding the universe and humanity’s place within it is core to our mission. The Big Questions funding area promotes an open-minded willingness to find new information through different perspectives.
Projects in this area explore character strengths such as compassion, creativity, curiosity, diligence, empathy, entrepreneurship, forgiveness, generosity, gratitude, honesty, hope, humility, humor, integrity, joy, kindness, love, optimism, perseverance, responsibility, self-regulation, selflessness, and wisdom
Freedom is necessary for a healthy, prosperous, and ethical society. We support projects that explore individual freedom, free markets, free enterprise, and entrepreneurship with the ultimate aim of improving society.
We support innovative projects in genetics, particularly those that advance the role of humanity in a creative universe.
We support programs that identify or nurture genius, as well as projects that research contributing factors to genius.
We support research projects and practical tools around the world that promote equitable, accessible, and voluntary use of family planning methods.
View the details of all of our core funding areas here.
Our Strategic Framework
Through this commitment, Templeton World Charity Foundation will support projects that share scientific discoveries and spiritual insights to spark fresh perspectives on life’s most profound questions.
Our strategy is not just about having good ideas or making interesting new discoveries but also about translating discoveries into new practices that can be developed using rigorous testing and launched for the benefit of individuals and communities. To that end, our outgoing strategy supports a range of activities across three different stages in the pipeline for new innovations: Discovery, Development, and Launch.
When supporting scientific research, we believe it is important to make sure that it is based on a sound conceptual framework and that key information about the experiments is accessible to anyone who may benefit from it. The projects we support adhere to best practices in open research. See our Open Science Priority here, and view our Open Access Policy here.
Discovery:
This stage involves rigorous and imaginative interdisciplinary research to answer key questions related to human flourishing, or research that contributes to the potential discovery of innovations that can promote human flourishing. Not all scientific discoveries can be predicted, so we remain enthusiastic about bold, high-risk projects where the benefits may not be immediately obvious.
Development:
This stage involves the development of new interventions to promote one or more aspects of human flourishing. Many types of activities fit within the Development stage, including the following:
• Research and practice review, innovation design;
• Iterative prototyping and pilot testing;
• Efficacy trials or other forms of proof-of-concept testing; and
• Replication, effectiveness, or scale-up testing in real-world settings.
These various activities aim to thoroughly test innovations to the point where we know whether they work, for whom, and under which circumstances they are effective. It is important to use an iterative process to consider qualitative, practice-based evidence early on in the development process.
Launch:
This phase focuses on creating resources and platforms to spread awareness of innovations. The academic setting, where many innovations are discovered and tested, does not always provide the best channel for distribution. We will facilitate partnerships with leading organizations across many sectors—such as business, government, NGOs, academia, and the media—for uptake and impact.
We will support programs across each of these phases of this framework. In most cases, however, grant activities will align with one of these phases.
We support open research and open access to research for two reasons. First, Templeton World Charity Foundation seeks to support discovery science. Such research can have a significant impact, but only if it can earn the trust of the broader scientific community. This is particularly vital for projects that aim to make impactful or contrarian discoveries because they carry a higher burden of proof.
Second, we have embraced a global mandate to support projects wherever they can have the greatest impact. It is crucial for this vision that the outputs of our projects are openly accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
We seek to support open science through multiple approaches such as building infrastructure, developing a community of inquiry, realigning incentives, and changing policy.
Our Priorities
