From 2003-2015, The Robert Bowne Foundation (RBF) funded the Edmund A. Stanley, Jr. Research Grants. A national grant which provided grants for research in out-of-school time settings, it had the following three goals:
1. To generate and disseminate research about organizations serving youth during the out-of-school hours;
2. To build a network of scholars studying organizations serving youth during the out-of-school hours; and
3. To contribute to basic knowledge and the improvement of practice and policy in the area of youth programs during the out-of-school hours.
The grants were either for original empirical research in or about youth programs during the non-school hours or research syntheses/policy analyses of youth programs.
Because the emphasis of the Foundation was to fund research and dissemination, each of the EAS Jr. grantees were requested to submit, as a final product, an article which would be considered for publication in either the journal Afterschool Matters or a spin-off of the journal, the Afterschool Matters Occasional Paper Series.
In the last two years of the grant, aligned with the goals of the Foundation, proposals were given priority if they submitted with a partner who was a practitioner in the field or a past National Afterschool Matters Practitioner Fellow. This was to help bridge the research-practice gap and to encourage research that was highly grounded in practice and ecologically valid. The last RFP was for the 2015 year, with a focus on language and literacy in the out-of-school time.
