Throughout this academic year, I will be using this Initiatives column to share parts of the college’s strategic plan. My goal is to help you understand the goals and how we aim to reach them, and to help you see yourself in the plan as someone who can not only help to implement it, but also can benefit from it.

This week’s initiatives column will focus on the first two action items of goal 3: Research addressing social issues, objective 4: supporting research for change, in our strategic plan for 2021-25. You can read the full plan on our website.

This objective calls on us to coordinate existing resources and enhance current mechanisms to increase our capacity to procure external funding for research activities.

The first action item calls on us to leverage internal resources to increase strength of external funding proposals.

There are four implementation tasks associated with this action item:

• Provide grant-writing workshops that focus on identifying appropriate funding, writing effective proposals and managing grants.
• Develop a grant-mentoring program that pairs experienced grant writers with less experienced grant writers.
• Create internal research grants for projects that are intended to improve the well-being of under-resourced and underrepresented communities.
• Provide research funds to support mentorships and research collaborations across disciplines.

The second action item calls on us to enhance support for the submission of external grant proposals.

There are four implementation tasks associated with this action item:

• Develop mechanisms to assist in identifying priorities of funding agencies, revising proposals based on panel review.
• Facilitate partnerships with other colleges and universities to identify key personnel in needed areas of expertise such as research methods or technology.
• Cultivate and coordinate clusters of proposals to support research for systemic change around themes of essential literacies, social justice, and mental health and well-being.
• Hire a grant editor to organize, to help edit proposals, and to check for required sections of proposals in research funding announcements.

We are making progress in all of these areas, and are communicating regularly about professional development and collaboration opportunities through Teams, email, in the messages I send to faculty and staff that are archived on our website, and through our department chairs. Our external grant procurement is increasing at a steady pace. To help facilitate transactional and budgetary work associated with the increase in external funding, we are adding services to our research office through the hire of a post-award specialist. In addition, we are renovating the research space in Rackley Building to create collaborative spaces that support the interdisciplinary and inter-institutional work we are seeking to do.

Coming up

The next Initiatives column will include a look at goal 3, objective 4, action item 3.