NIJ FY23 Research on the Abuse, Neglect, and Financial Exploitation of Older Adults | O NIJ 2023 171526

Opportunity Information: Apply for O NIJ 2023 171526

The NIJ FY23 Research on the Abuse, Neglect, and Financial Exploitation of Older Adults grant is a National Institute of Justice (U.S. Department of Justice) funding opportunity designed to build practical, actionable knowledge about victimization of older adults, defined here as people age 60 and above. It sits within the Office of Justice Programs broader priorities around civil rights and racial equity, access to justice, support for victims and justice-involved individuals, strengthened community safety, and increased trust between communities and the justice system. The program supports science and technology and other research and development work that can directly inform policy and practice in how communities prevent, identify, investigate, and respond to harm against older adults.

NIJ is looking for research and evaluation proposals in one (and only one) of four topic areas. The first area is evaluation of programs intended to prevent, intervene in, or respond to abuse, neglect, and financial exploitation of older adults, which could include testing real-world interventions and determining what works, for whom, and under what conditions. The second area focuses on research about individuals who abuse older adults, emphasizing the people and behaviors behind victimization and potentially the pathways, contexts, and risk factors associated with offending. The third area is polyvictimization, meaning studies that examine older adults who experience multiple types of victimization (for example, overlapping physical abuse, neglect, psychological abuse, and financial exploitation) and how those experiences interact. The fourth area is fraud and financial exploitation, aimed at understanding scams, deceptive practices, and misuse of an older adult's resources, including how such crimes occur, how they can be detected earlier, and what prevention or response approaches are most effective. Applicants must clearly align their proposal to one of these four categories.

A major feature of this solicitation is the emphasis on meaningful engagement with people who have lived experience related to the research topic. NIJ signals that proposals will receive special consideration when their methods include authentic involvement of stakeholders such as crime victims, community members, service providers, justice practitioners, and people with justice system involvement. In practice, this points toward designs that do more than consult stakeholders at the end; NIJ is encouraging engagement that shapes research questions, measurement choices, interpretation of findings, and dissemination so the work stays grounded in real conditions and real needs. NIJ also encourages multidisciplinary research teams, reflecting the reality that elder abuse and exploitation often cross boundaries between criminology, public health, social work, psychology, law, data science, and financial systems.

The solicitation also expects applicants to take diversity, discrimination, and bias seriously as research issues to be considered and measured where applicable. Specifically, NIJ highlights attention across age, gender and gender identity, race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation, which signals an interest in understanding unequal risk, unequal access to help, unequal system responses, and potential disparities in outcomes. Proposals that can rigorously capture these factors in sampling, measurement, analysis, and interpretation are aligned with the stated priorities.

For projects that involve partnerships with criminal justice agencies or other organizations, NIJ requires documentation showing those relationships are real and operational. Applications that propose such partnerships must include a letter of support from an appropriate decision-making authority at each partnering agency. Importantly, those letters must also acknowledge NIJ's data archiving requirement: de-identified data derived from, provided to, or obtained through the NIJ-funded award must be archived with the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD) at the end of the award. Applicants and partners are expected to consult NIJ data archiving guidance, plan for de-identification, and structure data-sharing accordingly. If selected, the grantee is expected to have a formal agreement with partnering agencies in place by January 1, 2024, and that agreement must include provisions that ensure compliance with the data archiving requirement.

Another point NIJ emphasizes is dissemination that actually moves findings into the field. Proposals are expected to include robust, creative, multi-pronged dissemination strategies, ideally built around partnerships with organizations and associations positioned to translate research into policy and practice changes. NIJ will give special consideration to proposals that dedicate at least 15 percent of the requested budget to these dissemination activities, and applicants must show that commitment in both the Budget Worksheet and Budget Narrative. This signals that NIJ is not only funding research outputs like reports and journal articles, but also the infrastructure needed to get results into the hands of practitioners, agencies, advocates, and decision-makers who can use them.

From an administrative and funding standpoint, this is a discretionary grant opportunity (CFDA 16.560) with an award ceiling of $1,500,000 and an expectation of about three awards. The opportunity was created January 27, 2023, with an original closing date of April 13, 2023. Eligibility is broad and includes state, county, and local governments; special districts; independent school districts; public and private institutions of higher education; federally recognized tribal governments and other tribal organizations; public housing authorities; nonprofits with or without 501(c)(3) status; for-profit organizations other than small businesses; and small businesses. For projects involving multiple entities using federal funds, NIJ requires that only one organization applies as the lead applicant, while other partners are structured as subrecipients. The lead applicant is expected to conduct the majority of the proposed work, meaning the project cannot be primarily carried by partners while the applicant serves mainly as a pass-through.

Overall, the solicitation is geared toward research that is methodologically strong, ethically grounded, and operationally useful: it must fit one of the four topic areas; it should incorporate lived-experience perspectives in meaningful ways; it should measure and grapple with equity and bias issues when relevant; it must plan for data archiving through NACJD when data are produced; and it should invest in dissemination that increases the odds the findings change real-world policy and practice for protecting older adults from abuse, neglect, fraud, and financial exploitation.

• The Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "NIJ FY23 Research on the Abuse, Neglect, and Financial Exploitation of Older Adults" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 16.560.
• This funding opportunity was created on Jan 27, 2023.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Apr 13, 2023. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $1,500,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 3 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: State governments, County governments, City or township governments, Special district governments, Independent school districts, Public and State controlled institutions of higher education, Native American tribal governments (Federally recognized), Public housing authorities/Indian housing authorities, Native American tribal organizations (other than Federally recognized tribal governments), Nonprofits having a 501(c)(3) status with the IRS, other than institutions of higher education, Nonprofits that do not have a 501(c)(3) status with the IRS, other than institutions of higher education, Private institutions of higher education, For profit organizations other than small businesses, Small businesses, Unrestricted (i.e., open to any type of entity above), subject to any clarification in text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility.

Apply for O NIJ 2023 171526

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