The Importance of Funding Communities Directly

The ICBOs (Independent Community-based Organizations), a group of fifteen community representatives from communities historically excluded from the sciences, share results from eight years of community-led de-colonial participatory action research. We wrote this white paper to share our findings and recommendations with funders like the National Science Foundation. These findings, recently published in BioScience (https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biac001), along with preliminary results from our current research, and our lived experiences point towards a critical need to change the existing status quo. The paper provides specific recommendations on how funders can take the lead in creating access, promoting more equitable processes, and providing direct funding to communities historically excluded from the sciences.