Columbia World Projects mobilizes the university’s researchers and scholars to work with governments, organizations, businesses and communities to tackle global challenges.

Columbia World Projects is a major new initiative that aims to forge a closer and more useful connection between the vast research capabilities of a great university and the needs of the world. Their work begins with thinking about urgent and difficult challenges that have not been sufficiently addressed. They bring together university experts across a wide range of disciplines — people who usually do not work together — with leading practitioners from non-academic institutions to think about what might create positive change.

They have many activities beyond their projects. They are an active presence on the Columbia campus and in the surrounding community through a wide range of events and convenings that engage faculty, students, and community members in their larger mission to connect the worlds of knowledge and action.

In the same spirit, they operate the Obama Foundation Scholars Program to use university resources to help make an annual cohort of rising activists more effective in their work. And they are researchers theirselves, on broad topics like cities and democratic institutions, rigorously studying how research can translate into successful practice.