When we designed the FeME seed fund programme, we asked a question that funders don’t always ask out loud: what would it take to fund engineering research the way we say engineering research should be done — inclusively, participatively, with care?
The answer turned out to be a series of small, deliberate choices. Some are structural. Some are budgetary. Some are about who we trust to apply, and how we treat them once they do. None of them are revolutionary on their own. Together, they shape how the cohort experiences the funding — and how the work itself can unfold.
Here are five of those choices.
- The Caring Pot
A portion of the seed fund budget is ringfenced as a “Caring Pot” — funds that recipients can request specifically to cover caring responsibilities: childcare during workshops, eldercare during fieldwork, support that lets a single parent travel to a partner site or attend a community meeting.
This isn’t a perk. It’s a recognition that “who can participate” is shaped by who carries care responsibilities, and that excluding those people from research excludes the perspectives most relevant to inclusive engineering.
Several projects in the 2026 cohort have already drawn on the Caring Pot. Without the Caring Pot, “fully participate” would have meant something narrower for them.
- Funding individuals and small organisations, not just universities
Of the 19 projects in the cohort, several are led by independent practitioners or small NGOs — Wilkat Ltd in Kenya, EcoBridge Charity Foundation in Nigeria, U-Inspire Indonesia, Dynamic Doctors Uganda, datocracy AI, Fancy Primary School in St Vincent. The funding flows to them directly, not via a university intermediary.
Most research funders find this difficult. Compliance is harder, financial systems are less standardised, and the perceived risk is higher. We took the view that requiring a university affiliation would systematically exclude exactly the people FeME exists to centre: lived-experience leaders, community-based practitioners, and small organisations doing climate-engineering work outside formal academic structures.
- Support as a built-in, not an add-on
One of the quieter design choices in the seed fund programme is that support isn’t uniform. Different projects need different things, and what counts as meaningful support for a small NGO running a community workshop in Nigeria isn’t the same as what an early-career researcher in Indonesia needs to deliver a data-driven flood resilience project. So rather than offering a single, generic wraparound, we designed support to match the shape of each fund.
For Data for Change recipients, that meant an intensive training programme — delivered by Talarify — running alongside the funded work. It’s not a light-touch webinar series. It’s a substantive course on participatory, ethical, and impact-oriented research practice, designed to strengthen how teams approach the work itself, not just deliver outputs. Recipients move through it together, which builds a peer cohort alongside the individual projects.
For the Discovery Challenge and Represent and Innovate and Challenge Discovery recipients, the structure is different: many are paired with a FeME mentor — a member of the network’s leadership team who act as a sounding board through the life of the grant. Mentors aren’t there to monitor or evaluate; they’re there to support, connect, and help recipients navigate the structures around their project.
Across all three funds, peer connection runs alongside the formal support. Cohort calls, shared learning spaces, and the FeME Tapestry contribution (the cross-cohort learning artefact) are designed to make sure recipients aren’t working in isolation, and that the relationships built through the funding can outlast the grant period.
This matters most for early-career and first-time grant holders, but it matters for everyone. It signals that the relationship between funder and funded is ongoing, not transactional — and that “support” means different things for different projects, and is worth designing accordingly.
- Applications scaled to the funding, not the funder’s comfort
The three seed fund calls each had different requirements, but a shared principle: keep the application proportionate to what’s being asked for and what’s being offered. Short forms. Plain-language guidance. Criteria published upfront. No requirement for institutional letterhead, complex financial templates, or the kinds of supporting documents that quietly tell small organisations and independent practitioners “this isn’t really for you.”
This sounds like a small thing. It isn’t. Application burden is one of the most consistent ways that funding processes filter out the people they claim to want to reach — not through explicit exclusion, but through the cumulative weight of forms designed for institutions with grants offices. Keeping things proportionate was a deliberate choice to widen who could realistically apply.
We’re still learning where this lands well and where it doesn’t. Several recipients have flagged that even a proportionate process can be hard to navigate when English isn’t your first language, or when your organisation’s finance systems aren’t set up for international transfers. That feedback is shaping how we approach the next round.
- Reporting that reflects the work, not the form
Reporting requirements vary across the three funds, but they share an intention: to capture what happened, what was learned, and what mattered, in formats that work for the project. Challenge Discovery teams report through post-visit reflections and an online showcase. Data for Change teams share training outputs openly. Represent and Innovate teams produce a final report and an optional video.
The “Tapestry Contribution” — a shared learning artefact across the cohort — invites projects to contribute in whatever form fits their work: writing, image, audio, conversation. It’s an attempt to take seriously the idea that knowledge from this kind of work doesn’t always live in PDF.
What we’re learning
None of this is finished. The seed fund programme is itself an experiment, and the choices above are working hypotheses, not settled answers. We’re learning as the cohort delivers — about where flexibility helps and where it creates friction, about where care-centred funding lands well and where it needs rethinking, about what “inclusive funding” actually requires in practice rather than principle.
What we can say so far is this: small structural choices change who applies, who gets funded, and what the work can look like once the funding lands. That’s not a complete theory of change. But it’s a place to start.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll share more about the cohort: the women leading work across the network, and a view of climate-engineering challenges across the regions where these projects sit.