Selection Criteria

Applicants must submit a narrative that addresses each of the selection criteria (Significance, Impact, and Influence), responding where appropriate to the questions under each criterion.

The application process is different for the individual Prizes and the Corporate Leadership Award. Those seeking to nominate a business for the Corporate Leadership Award should apply here.

The narrative should be a maximum of five single-spaced typed pages with 12-point or larger font size and 1-inch margins. Applicants will be judged on the following three criteria:

Who can apply?
Individuals, nonprofit and community organizations, private businesses, religious groups, and government entities, agencies, or officials operating in the United States.

MPI staff, J.M. Kaplan Fund staff, and Advisory Board members and the organizations employing them are not eligible to apply.

Selection process details.

SIGNIFICANCE: How significant is the issue, population group, program, or practice that your initiative addresses?

Questions to Consider:
• What is the concern that your initiative seeks to address or the need it seeks to meet? What made you or your organization decide this was an important enough issue to get involved in?
• How is your initiative critical to the integration of immigrants and native-born communities and the success of immigrants and their families in your community or state?
• Given other efforts in your community/state/field to address immigrant integration and success, what makes your contribution especially valuable? How does your initiative compare or fit with other work in the area of immigrant integration and its various subfields such as health care, early childhood and preK-16 education, adult literacy, workforce training, economic development, business entrepreneurship, civic participation, and/or intergroup relations?

IMPACT: How effective has your initiative been in achieving significant immigrant integration outcomes?

Questions to Consider:
• What did you set out to accomplish? To what degree did you accomplish it? How do you know? What other consequences, expected or unexpected, did your initiative achieve?
• What specific and measurable results can you provide to show individual, family, or broader community outcomes?
• To what extent has the initiative resulted in changes in the policies and practices of organizations or institutions in your community? In relationships among members of your community? In other factors that affect immigrant integration?

INFLUENCE: To what extent is the initiative likely to influence the efforts of others?

Questions to Consider:
• Has your initiative influenced others in your own community or field or in other communities or fields? How?
• What is your assessment of whether your initiative could be replicated? What would it take and what kinds of organizations or communities would be best suited to do so?
• What core elements of your approach are particularly innovative and/or effective? Why would people want to adopt these rather than other approaches?
• How long has your initiative been in operation? Do you foresee that your initiative will still be in operation two years from now? Five years from now? What do you think are the risks to sustaining your initiative and how do you plan to handle them?