Thank you! Though 2009 has been a year of financial challenges, the SSRC continues to lead in making social science more innovative and effective. Your support has been vital. As you make year-end contributions I hope you will think of the SSRC again. You can donate online by clicking here.

Global market upheaval hurt our endowment and those of foundations that support our work. It joined with wars, climate change and humanitarian disasters to make the world less stable. It also made social science more important. SSRC projects on conflict prevention and peace, private and public dimensions of risk, and the relation of migration to environment all became more urgent.

New 2010 projects will strengthen African social science, peacebuilding research, and transregional international studies. We are also incubating exciting ventures that will eventually become independent: Startl will create a public interest corporation to develop new media and technologies for learning. With the UN we are developing a global center for research on gender, conflict and security and helping to find it a permanent base in the Global South.

Communicating research-based knowledge to broader publics and policy makers is also central. Just one example: during 2009 the SSRC’s American Human Development Project produced exciting online tools and special state-level analyses complementing its widely acclaimed report, The Measure of America. A rigorous but easy-to-use reference on quality-of-life, this was used in community level discussions and organizations from the NAACP to Oxfam as well as universities. A new edition will appear in 2010 with a focus on vulnerability and security.

Perhaps most importantly in these hard times, the Council is a crucial support for the individual work of new social scientists. We fund more than a hundred outstanding up-and-coming researchers annually through the International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF), Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF), the Mellon Mays Graduate Initiatives Program, and others.

This all depends on your support. Foundation grants fund projects but we need core funding just to exist. Therefore, as the year winds down, I end this letter as I began, asking you to donate to the Council. Your gift will be crucial to SSRC support for hundreds of researchers doing basic creative work and bringing better knowledge to the public.

Thanks again for all your help. Happy Holidays!

Thank you,

Craig Calhoun
SSRC President