NSF Broadening Participation

NSF Broadening Participation is the U.S. National Science Foundation’s coordinated portfolio of funding programs, proposal-level plan requirements, and strategic goals aimed at increasing the participation of individuals, institutions, and geographic regions that are underrepresented in NSF-funded STEM research and education. NSF’s own guidance defines the target groups in three categories: individuals (women, underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities, and persons with disabilities), institutions (women’s colleges, minority-serving institutions such as HBCUs and Tribal Colleges and Universities, and institutions that primarily serve persons with disabilities), and geographic areas (rural and urban areas, and jurisdictions eligible under NSF’s EPSCoR program). Broadening Participation is a defined, budgeted element of NSF’s own accounting of its programs — NSF publishes an annual NSF Programs to Broaden Participation table alongside its budget request — not a loose synonym for any diversity-related activity an institution happens to run.

Broadening Participation vs. the Broader Impacts review criterion

These two terms are related but not interchangeable, and conflating them is a common source of confusion in proposal development offices. NSF’s merit review evaluates every proposal against two co-equal criteria: Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts. Broader Impacts is a broad category covering many possible kinds of societal benefit — STEM education and training, public engagement, research infrastructure, industry partnerships, and, among other options, increasing participation of underrepresented groups in STEM. Broadening Participation, by contrast, is NSF’s narrower and more specific term for the actual funded programs, target-group definitions, and (in some directorates) mandatory plan requirements built around underrepresentation. A proposal can satisfy Broader Impacts through an activity that has nothing to do with Broadening Participation (for example, K-12 curriculum development or open-source software dissemination), and some proposals are subject to a distinct, separately reviewed Broadening Participation plan on top of — not instead of — their Broader Impacts statement. For the review-criterion side of this distinction and NSF’s 2024 revisions to how Broader Impacts is evaluated, see CASRAI’s companion piece, What ‘broader impacts’ means under the new NSF policy.

Major Broadening Participation funding programs

NSF runs Broadening Participation programs both as NSF-wide efforts and within individual directorates. Programs that regularly appear in NSF’s own Broadening Participation budget table include:

• ADVANCE — funds systemic, organizational-change interventions at institutions to increase the participation and advancement of women in academic STEM careers, rather than funding individual researchers directly.
• LSAMP (Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation) — funds multi-institution alliances to increase the number of students from underrepresented minority groups who complete STEM baccalaureate and, through related tracks, graduate degrees.
• HBCU-UP (Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program) — supports STEM education and research capacity building specifically at HBCUs.
• TCUP (Tribal Colleges and Universities Program) — the parallel capacity-building program for Tribal Colleges and Universities.
• EPSCoR (Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) — targets jurisdictions (states, territories) that have historically received a smaller share of NSF research funding, using a geographic rather than individual-demographic eligibility test.
• AGEP (Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate) — focused specifically on increasing the number of underrepresented-minority faculty in STEM.
• Directorate-specific programs, such as CISE’s Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) initiative, discussed below.

Where a Broadening Participation plan becomes a proposal requirement

Beyond the dedicated programs above, some NSF directorates require applicants to submit a specific written Broadening Participation plan as part of an otherwise unrelated research proposal. The clearest current example is CISE‘s Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) Plan: CISE core-program solicitations require a BPC plan — describing concrete departmental or project-level activities to broaden participation in computing research and education — for Medium-scale (and larger) proposals, generally due at the time of submission rather than only if an award is made. NSF directs applicants to the NSF-funded BPCnet Resource Portal for BPC plan templates and departmental-plan guidance. Because this kind of plan requirement is set at the directorate or program-solicitation level rather than uniformly across all of NSF, a research administrator should always check the specific PAPPG-governed program solicitation for a given competition rather than assuming a Broadening Participation plan is or isn’t required based on a different directorate’s practice.

Worked examples

• A biology department applying for an NSF LSAMP alliance grant is applying to a Broadening Participation program in NSF’s own budget classification — eligibility and review are built directly around increasing underrepresented-minority student participation in STEM, not evaluated as one possible Broader Impacts activity among many.
• A CISE Medium proposal PI drafts a BPC plan describing the department’s current demographic composition, planned recruitment and mentoring activities, and how progress will be tracked — a distinct, separately required document from the proposal’s general Broader Impacts statement, evaluated as part of the CISE-specific review process.
• An EPSCoR-jurisdiction PI applies through an EPSCoR track — their eligibility rests on their state’s or territory’s EPSCoR status, a geographic Broadening Participation mechanism, independent of the individual PI’s own demographic background.

Related CASRAI resources

See the Grants Management & Research Funding cluster hub for the full range of CASRAI content on the funding lifecycle, NSF PAPPG (Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide) for the governing document behind directorate-specific plan requirements, NSF Merit Review Panel for how Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts are evaluated, and NSF Grants: An Overview for how Broadening Participation programs fit into NSF’s broader funding system. For the closest NIH analogue, see NIH Diversity Supplement: Eligibility and How to Apply, and for the individual-level counterpart in a hiring or grant context, see Diversity statement.