Last year, we updated our mission from “build the field of cellular agriculture” to “maximize the positive impact of cellular agriculture.” What appears to be a subtle change actually reflects a monumental shift in thinking.
Over the last several years, we’ve seen our grantees become important founders and scientific leaders at companies. New Harvest built the field of cellular agriculture by empowering industry leaders who raise funds, employ people, and advance private sector science. It’s an incredible story of leadership development driven by donor support.
Now, we are gearing up to take things to the next level!
In the spirit of remaining nimble and responsive to the changing needs of the field, we are reimagining our grant program. We will be supporting our grantees for the entirety of their grants, but New Harvest will not be accepting further applications for our research fellowship, seed grant, or dissertation award.
So what’s next?
In the coming year, we will be experimenting with new programs focused on empowering emerging leaders. We’re not sure what these programs will look like—they might be similar to the programs of yesteryear, they might be very different!—we just know that it’s time to realign our programming to our new mission.
Will we keep funding science? Always! Public research is still a terribly neglected aspect of cellular agriculture, especially independently funded science that isn’t beholden to private interests. But we need to be more strict about values alignment and open access in the research we do fund so we can make room for values-aligned projects that may not take place in a wet lab.
We’ll keep you posted on what develops! In the meantime, if you have ideas for what kind of leaders are missing from cellular agriculture and how we can use our funding to pull them in, don’t hesitate to drop me a note at isha@new-harvest.org.
