CIHR Planning and Dissemination Grant

A CIHR Planning and Dissemination Grant is one of the smallest, most narrowly scoped funding mechanisms in the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) portfolio. It is issued under CIHR’s Institute/Initiative Community Support (ICS) umbrella and is intended to fund the logistics of planning a future research initiative or disseminating the results of completed research — not to fund the conduct of research itself.

Purpose

Per the program’s own framing (consistently described across CIHR-affiliated research office funding-opportunity pages), Planning and Dissemination Grants support planning and/or dissemination activities, virtual or in-person, that are consistent with CIHR’s mandate and relevant to the priorities of the sponsoring CIHR Institute(s) or Initiative(s). In practice this covers two related but distinct activity types:

• Planning activities — convening researchers, knowledge users, partner organizations, or Indigenous community representatives to design a future research program, coalition, or larger funding application.
• Dissemination activities — workshops, symposia, or knowledge-translation events that communicate health research evidence to the appropriate researcher or knowledge-user audiences.

Funding amount and duration

The amount available varies by the specific CIHR Institute or Initiative sponsoring a given competition — ICS is a shared mechanism used repeatedly across CIHR’s Institutes rather than a single standing program with one fixed budget line. Across the competitions reviewed, the funding is described as a variable amount up to a program-wide ceiling of $50,000, for a period of up to one year. Applicants should always confirm the exact ceiling and eligible activity list in the specific funding opportunity text they are applying under, since amounts and eligible costs are set per competition rather than being a single fixed program parameter.

Eligibility

Eligible Nominated Principal Applicants typically include independent researchers or knowledge users affiliated with a Canadian postsecondary institution or its affiliated institutions (including hospitals), government researchers in Canada (where the activity is not already funded through a government program), trainees registered at a Canadian institution, individuals affiliated with Indigenous non-governmental organizations in Canada, and Canadian non-profit or community organizations. Many competitions also require the Nominated Principal Applicant to have completed a CIHR Institute of Gender and Health sex- and gender-based analysis training module and submit a certificate of completion as part of the application.

What is explicitly not funded

This is the detail that most reliably distinguishes a Planning and Dissemination Grant from CIHR’s research-funding mechanisms. The grant does not support:

• The direct cost of research, including pilot projects, feasibility studies, or full operating grants
• Primary research or primary data collection
• Principal Investigator or co-investigator salaries

Research assistant salaries directly tied to planning or dissemination work are generally allowable, since they support the event/planning activity itself rather than the conduct of research.

Where it sits on CIHR’s funding ladder

CIHR operates several mechanisms that can look superficially similar to a research administrator scanning a funding-opportunity list, but each has a distinct role:

• Planning and Dissemination Grant (this page) — funds the logistics of planning a future initiative or disseminating existing findings. Does not fund research activity of any kind.
• CIHR Catalyst Grant — seed/pilot funding (typically up to one year, amount set per competition) intended to generate preliminary data or test feasibility, explicitly framed by CIHR as a step toward demonstrating enough potential to justify a full operating-grant application.
• CIHR Project Grant — CIHR’s main investigator-initiated operating-grant mechanism, funding the actual conduct of a research program (expected budget range roughly CA$50,000–CA$800,000 across a duration of about 1–5 years, two competitions per year).

A useful way to sequence these for a grants office or PI: a Planning and Dissemination Grant can fund the meetings that shape a research question and assemble a team; a Catalyst Grant can then fund the pilot work that generates preliminary data; a Project Grant can fund the resulting full research program. Not every project moves through all three — many Project Grant applications are built on data or partnerships that never went through a formal Planning and Dissemination or Catalyst stage — but understanding where each mechanism sits on that ladder helps research administrators route an investigator’s request to the right funding opportunity rather than misapplying to a program whose exclusions (as above) would make the application ineligible.

Administrative notes for research offices

Because ICS-branded competitions are issued repeatedly under different sponsoring Institutes with their own deadlines and priority areas, research administrators should treat ‘Planning and Dissemination Grant’ as a competition type rather than a single standing program to bookmark once. Institutional research offices commonly circulate each new ICS Planning and Dissemination competition separately as it opens, since the eligible topic area, budget ceiling, and deadline can all shift between rounds even though the underlying mechanism and exclusions stay consistent.