By Jayatri Das, Chief Bioscientist at The Franklin Institute My town has an old-school fire siren. It bellows out three long blasts whenever the fire department is needed. Some…

How Julia Minson helps people disagree better Ballroom dancing may seem an unlikely setting for lessons in psychology, but as a graduate student studying disagreement, Julia Minson drew on…

Angélica Valdés Valderrama helps community leaders transform local challenges into sustainable solutions When power or water fails at her home in Puerto Rico—a frustratingly common occurrence—Angélica Valdés Valderrama knows exactly where…

How Shannon Dosemagen is working toward systems change When the BP oil spill devastated the Gulf Coast in 2010, Shannon Dosemagen had a front-row seat to the disaster as…

Leading to Discovery: A Conversation between Francis Collins and Harvey Fineberg In December 2025, the Rita Allen Foundation hosted a fireside chat between Francis Collins and Harvey Fineberg to honor…

By Elizabeth Green, Founder and CEO of Civic News Company, the publisher of nonprofit newsrooms Chalkbeat, Votebeat, and Healthbeat.  When we launched Healthbeat last year, we…

By Emily Howell, Research and Impact Fellow, Rita Allen Foundation At the Falling Walls Science Summit in Berlin, Germany on November 9, I joined Civic Science Fellows …

Civic Science Fellow Lisa Maillard works to help funders support more effective community-engaged research When Lisa Maillard and her colleagues walked into a municipal building in Florida, ready to…

Civic Science Fellow Eunice Mercado-Lara Turns Open-Science Talk into Action Applying for funding can be a time-consuming, opaque process that presents barriers for some applicants, particularly smaller, under-resourced organizations.

How Rose Hendricks transforms language into climate action At the Planetary Health Action Fair in San Francisco this fall, Rose Hendricks moved between twenty poster presentations, each one a…