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Introduction & Purpose
This call for proposals (CFP) invites eligible nonprofit organizations in the U.S. to apply for a grant to collect, analyze, and use data to address inequities in the physical, economic, and social conditions of a place. Improving these conditions is key to achieving health equity where health is no longer a privilege, but a right. Structural racism is one of the leading barriers that results in inequities in conditions within and across communities. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) expects to award up to 30 grants of $50,000 each, with a period of performance of nine months. The Urban Institute, as the national coordinating center for this program, is collaborating with RWJF on program design, grantee support, and communications.

Local data can be valuable tools to make progress on building places that offer everyone the chance to be as healthy as possible. Community organizations and residents can use data to understand challenges, set priorities, advocate for what is important to them, and hold others accountable for promised changes. 

• What counts as data? Data are any collected statistics or information. Data may be quantitative, like counts or percentages based on information from surveys or the operations of governments, foundations, or nonprofits. They may also be qualitative, such as stories from lived experience or information collected through focus groups or interviews. All data are inherently shaped by the purposes, assumptions, and biases of the people who created them. 

The goals of the Local Data for Equitable Communities grant program are to:

• Inform public policy and improve the physical, social, and economic conditions of places: Data can be a transformational tool for community-based nonprofits to answer questions directly relevant to on-the-ground efforts to improve the physical, social, or economic conditions of a place. With key data in hand, nonprofits can inform public discourse, resulting in program and policy solutions that reduce health inequities.
• Build local capacity to use data for action: A community with data capacity is one where people can access and use data to better understand and improve outcomes where they live. This grant program supports community organizations to collect, analyze, and use data about a locally relevant and timely issue. As they do so, their capacity to use and apply data is strengthened, which leads to a stronger influence in their communities to achieve important community-driven goals. 
• Strengthen the use of equitable data practices: Equity should be a leading consideration in how data are collected and, ultimately, in who gets to interpret, disseminate, and leverage data to take action. People most affected by racial, economic, and geographic inequities in health and well being need to be able to access, interpret, and contribute data to assess structural inequities in their communities. They should have the opportunity to participate in decision making about how to address barriers and design solutions to improve healthy equity based on that data.
• Document successful practices for more communities to learn from and adapt: This grant program funds organizations to address immediate local needs and conditions, informed by data relevant to project questions that are locally determined. The program is designed such that resulting projects will create and disseminate a diverse and innovative set of practices that will be relevant and useful to other places.
   

NIFA requests applications for the Youth Farm Safety Education and Certification (YFSEC) Program for fiscal year (FY) 2025 to support national efforts for delivering timely, pertinent, and appropriate farm safety education to youth seeking employment or who are employed in agricultural production. 

The National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s Agricultural Genome to Phenome Initiative (AG2PI) focuses on  collaborative science engagement that intends to develop a community of researchers across both crops and animals that will lay the foundation for expanding knowledge concerning genomes and phenomes of importance to the agriculture sector of the United States. Success of the initiative will inform approaches to understanding how variable weather, environments, and production systems interact with genetic diversity present in crops and animals to impact growth and productivity.  This will provide greater accuracy in predicting crop and animal performance under variable conditions and more efficient selection of well-adapted, superior genotypes that farmers and ranchers can produce. 

These goals require interdisciplinary approaches that combine technologies such as advanced computing, automated high throughput phenotyping and genotyping as well as climatic modeling to be successful.  The initiative seeks to build on efforts such as the Plant Genome Research Project, the National Animal Genome Research Program, and other public initiatives. Key criteria include promoting fair access to data, software, germplasm, and other biological materials through open data sources, standards, and exchange of research materials. The initiative also seeks to connect animal sciences (e.g. animal physiology, meat science, animal nutrition, and veterinary science), plant sciences (e.g. agronomy, crop modeling, and plant physiology) and allied fields including genetics, genomics, artificial intelligence, informatics, statistics and engineering. 

Background

Lipid oxidation is a leading cause of food spoilage, resulting in significant product rejection, waste, and consumer dissatisfaction. Hexanal, a volatile organic compound formed during lipid oxidation, is a key indicator of this spoilage and plays a critical role in monitoring food quality. Unfortunately, current methods for testing hexanal are often time-consuming, inefficient, and not suitable for use at the manufacturing plant level. Our current setup, for instance, depends on highly sensitive equipment that requires a skilled technician for maintenance, takes anywhere from half a day to a full day to complete testing, and requires several more hours to generate results. These challenges directly impact productivity, increase operational costs, and undermine customer trust in product quality.

What we're looking for

We are looking for innovative, economical, and effective technologies capable of accurately and efficiently quantifying hexanal levels in dry materials such as animal protein. By implementing the potential cutting-edge solutions, our goal is to improve quality control efficiency for both incoming raw materials and products, ensuring product quality and minimizing waste. The ideal solution should provide precise hexanal quantification with minimal preparation and quick analysis, while being affordable and user-friendly for implementation at the manufacturing plant level.

Solutions of interest include:

• Atmospheric pressure chemical ionization mass spectrometry (APCI-MS)
• Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS)-hyphenated technologies (e.g., GC-IMS)
• Selected ion flow tube mass spectrometry (SIFT-MS)
• Proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry (PTR-MS)
• Portable GC-MS or HPLC
• Direct analysis in real time (DART-MS)
• Ion mobility mass spectrometry (IMS)
• Technologies that quantify other key lipid oxidation derivatives for quality control

Our must-have requirements are:

• Measures hexanal in dry animal proteins, ranging from 3 -10 ppm, with a Limit of Quantification (LOQ) of ≤ 3.0 ppm
• Supports testing of at least 10 samples daily
• Completes the measurement in 60 mins or less, from sample preparation to final result
• Cost-effective, ideally within $50K-100k USD for equipment and consumable costs below $30 USD per test

Our nice-to-have's are:

• Achieves a Limit of Quantification (LOQ) of ≤ 1.0 ppm
• Consumables ongoing cost < $15 USD per test
• Accurately quantifies hexanal in other dry materials
• Supports testing of at least 30 samples daily
• Does not require the use of solvent or gas besides air or nitrogen
• Required daily preventive maintenance ≤ 15 mins
• Commercially available for immediate deployment

What's out of scope:

• Technologies involving complex analysis steps, such as sample purification, distillation, and derivatization
• Technologies that require the use of toxic or CMR (carcinogenic, mutagenic and reprotoxic) reagent