When we first imagined the Technology & Adolescent Wellness program, we planned for the most successful grantees in Year 1 to receive a second grant in Year 2. A maximum of 2 of the 6 grantees would receive another year of funding.
COVID-19 changed that. This spring, it was very clearly not the time to release a competitive call for grant proposals – especially not when we had viable alternatives.
COVID-19 has encouraged us at TAM to think creatively about how we can put the remaining funding to use, how we can maximize responsiveness to the pandemic while putting as little stress as possible on our TAM investigators.
With this in mind, each of the six grantees has now received a second year of funding. Of course, this means that each grant is smaller than we had initially planned. That being said, we have been amazed by the ways in which investigators are using the smaller grants to maximize real-time impact, further the science, and give back.
As with Year 1, we are sharing investigators’ journeys in Year 2. Keep checking in with individual investigators in the Projects menu to see some of the most up-to-date research on adolescent technology use in the COVID era.