(and if you're a CHS user, please do write us into your grants; I have most of the paperwork you probably need, shoot me an email!)

In the meantime, anything you give goes to help CHS stay available as a community resource long into the future.

Please consider donating before the end of the year, to take advantage of the 100% match from our generous anonymous donor. Here's that link again:

giving.mit.edu/search/node/...

We've been very lucky to have grants from the federal government to build CHS, but our current major awards are coming to an end, and especially right now, we can't count on those sources of funds continuing.

So, we are innovating: hopefully more news to come on that front in early 2026!

...sometimes they mean cash in the bank, and sometimes they mean a working/governance model that can reliably keep an organization going in the long term, both making money and building what we're trying to build as a community.

Children Helping Science needs both!

Because, as a researcher sitting in a lab in a department at MIT, I actually literally have no way to collect this money. We've tried! It's possible at some universities and in some situations. But not for us in our current setup.

When people talk about "sustainability" for projects like this...

Right now, we get this done in a slow and complicated way: when researchers apply for grants, they can write us in as a sub-award. We do a whole bunch of paperwork, and then we all wait a year or so and maybe something works out.

Why not just charge people a fee when they use the site?

People often ask why we don't charge for CHS. Our mission is to serve the scientific community, and we never want funds to be a barrier. But when researchers do have funding for their science, it absolutely makes sense for them to support this community resource!

Something people often don't realize is that as a research scientist working full time on open science infrastructure, MIT doesn't pay my salary, or those of my team members.

We raise that money (and the rest of the CHS budget) through grant applications and charitable donations small & large.

They're all good posts bront

(...but they can't all be bangers)

I actually think the psych scientists have a special advantage that (if we so choose) we can lean on our expertise in human judgement being self-fooling to soften the hits to our ego. So I suspect that psych/social scientists are far more likely to admit to self-deception, but not to experience it.

I'm so sorry to hear this Simine, I'll be thinking of you and Hugo - I still remember thinking that he deserves a children's book about his trans-pacific(?) journey to Australia. A sweet giant on at least 2 continents.

Bravo @simine.com !!!!!!