Thoughts from the President

May 2, 2025 - The Good, the Bad, and the More Good

Dear Danforth Center Community,

As in most weeks during these chaotic times, there were both good reasons to celebrate the Danforth Center community and our work, as well as opportunities to display resilience and exercise patience. I want to update the community on a few items across both categories.

Annual Engagement Survey – We received results this week and were thrilled to see over 71% of employed community members complete the 2025 survey. That was significantly higher than the 52% participation from last year. Our “Overall Workplace Experience Score” increased to 78%, up 5 percentage points from last year and 6 points above the benchmark for organizations similar to ours. Not only were scores up across most categories, we received 649 written comments. I sincerely thank everyone who took the time and effort to participate in this year’s survey. The team from People and Culture will be in touch next week with much more information about Survey results and ways in which you can provide more feedback and input.

Concerns about the National Science Foundation – The NSF is one of our top three funding agencies. For the past few months, we’ve been experiencing delays in both activation of new NSF awards and implementation of incremental funding (e.g. funding for the next year of a multi-year project,) as was also described this morning in a news article posted at Nature. For example, incremental funding for the 2025 Summer Research Experiences for Undergraduate (REU) program has been delayed with no timeline to activation. And as was expected, NSF today announced an order to cap indirect cost rates at 15% of direct costs, though we also expect that order to be held up in court. We are monitoring the situation at NSF carefully and communicating our serious concerns to elected officials.

Encouraging support from the Saigh Foundation. I communicated recently about redirecting some of the Future Forward fundraising effort towards mitigating potential loss of federal grant funds, and how private donors and foundations are more important than ever to the Center. The redirection has already begun, and we’ve been encouraged by responses from several donors. The Saigh Foundation, for example, recently provided funding to support five REU students this summer. When combined with other funding sources, this will enable the program to train 17 students this year, even without incremental NSF support. The Foundation has also made a multi-year commitment that enables the Danforth Center to support REU or other training activities well into the future. Many thanks to Lee’at Bachar in the Development team for above-and-beyond work with the Saigh Foundation.

Jim Carrington,
President and Chief Executive Officer

Previous Weekly Messages from Jim Carrington