The Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) recently announced their Research and Evaluation (R&E) Initiative. The R&E Initiative is designed to study approaches to addressing and preventing domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence, and stalking, so that communities benefiting from OVW grant funds will be better equipped to align their work with practices that are known to be effective.

OVW’s R&E Initiative seeks proposals for evaluations of Violence Against Women Act (VAWA)-funded interventions and emerging innovations in diverse communities and in settings including law enforcement, prosecution, courts, victim services, community-based and culturally specific programs, healthcare, schools, faith communities, and more. The initiative supports researcher-practitioner partnerships and a broad range of rigorous research and evaluation methods, including qualitative, mixed-method, quasi-experimental, and experimental designs. Grants of up to $500,000 are available. View the full call for proposals here.

For FY 2025, OVW encourages R&E Initiative applicants to address one or more of the following topics, which are described in full in the Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO): evaluations of VAWA-funded interventions, evaluations of trainings, strategies, policies, practices, tools, and other means of fostering trauma-informed law enforcement and prosecutorial responses to sexual assault, domestic/dating violence, and stalking, research and evaluation on LGBT-specific services, outreach, training, education, and prevention, research and evaluation on ways of ensuring language access in responses to gender-based violence, evaluation of training curricula, tools, and other technical assistance (TA) resources developed and implemented with OVW grant funds, evaluations of emerging innovations, secondary data analyses related to domestic/dating violence, sexual assault, and/or stalking, research, evaluation, and data analysis related to domestic violence homicide prevention, and evaluations of restorative practices. This year’s R&E Initiative topic areas include a $5 million funding opportunity to evaluate Abby Honold Act-funded programs.