 I'm Beth Nelson, I'm the regional coordinator for the North Central Region and I am speaking to you today out of my office, my blurred office I should say on the St. Paul campus at the University of Minnesota. And we host the CERA program. And I'm joined today by my colleagues Marie Flanagan and Aaron Schneider who are helping to run this webinar and I'll start by saying this is a Zoom webinar, not a Zoom meeting, which means that we, you can't see each other as participants. And so if you have questions, Aaron is monitoring the chat and she will get your questions to me as they come in or hold till the end. So this is a presentation about applying for a North Central Region CERA graduate student grant. So if that's what you're interested in, you are in the right place. And I will also say we're going to go through a pretty brief slide, it's a lot of slides, but we'll cover it in about 25 minutes and all of those slides are also on our manage or apply for grant section of the North Central CERA website. So that's something you can go back to and look into as well, especially toward the end I'll go over some screenshots of the application system. And I know that that will be most useful to you to look at after the fact when you're actually in the system and and are applying. But I'm going to start by just going through a few basic things about the North Central CERA, kind of what our programs and our priorities are. So that gives you an idea of the program that you're applying to, then I'll go over some specifics about the graduate student grant program. And I will warn you that I'm just starting to get a cold, so my voice is a little bit hoarse and I hope it holds out to the duration. So I think Marie, if you can queue up the first slide, we will go ahead and jump in. So as I said, this is about applying for a 2024 North Central Region CERA Graduate Student Grant Program. And this is a competitive grant program that funds graduate student projects that address sustainable agriculture issues. Program proposals must be submitted by April 18th, which is a Thursday by four o'clock p.m. Central Daylight Time, and at that time, the system closes to applications. So please be sure that you are prepared well ahead of time and get your application in. You do need to go through your grants office. So you basically have to have your budget and your and your part of the project written, usually a good week ahead of the deadline so that the grants office can look it over and give you the approval to submit. So a word of warning, be prepared early so you can go to the next slide. So the first thing you want to do if you haven't already is to download the call for proposals. So I will go over a lot of the information that's in there. The online application system does also give you some of that information. But there's a little additional information in the call for proposals. So you should download that from the website. And this was before we had it posted. If you go to our graduate student grant page on the website now, you'll see that the call is there for you to download. And you can go ahead and move on to the next slide. So the USDA Sustainable Ag Research and Education Program is commonly referred to by our acronym, SARE. We are a part of USDA and we're funded through the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, or NEPA, for the next slide. Our mission statement is we provide grants and outreach to advance sustainable innovations to the whole of American agriculture. So as you can tell, that's a very broad charge. And as I'll show later, we do accept grants on a whole lot of different topic areas. You can go to the next slide. So we like to think of ourselves as a different kind of a grant program. We've been around for more than 30 years now. We're decentralized in that we are regionally organized. So we're in the north-central region, which are the upper 12 Midwest states. We fund science-based research, but we have a huge emphasis on grassroots problem solving. And so you will hear me say over and over during this seminar that we fund work that is farmer rancher driven. So we like to solve problems that have fairly immediate application on a farmer's field. So we recognize that basic research is really important. But that's not what our funding supports. We are a competitive grant program. And I'll say a little bit more about that as we go along. We also do require outreach, which means that if you're doing a research project, you're going to be gathering that data. But you also are going to have to tell us how you plan to share that information with the end user, which we are supposing is going to be farmers and ranchers in your area. You go to the next slide. I did just want to say a little bit. We are largely a grant making program, but we also prepare materials based on the research that's produced by those grants. And there's a wealth of information available on our national SARE website. And you can download the bulletins for free. There is PDFs. There are books that are also usually available as PDFs. Or you can order those items online as well at that site. You can go to the next slide. I told you we're decentralized. So those golden states there are the north central SARE states. And we each have our own grant programs and priorities. So in the north central region, we have grants that go directly to farmers and ranchers to try an idea on their farmer ranch. We have our larger research and education grants that usually go to larger institutions or nonprofits. We have a partnership grant program that pairs an ag extension professional or not necessarily extension, an ag educator or an ag professional with three farmers or ranchers to research a problem. Professional development, which is really a train the trainer program. Our graduate student grant program. And then we also have a youth educator grant program. And you can go to the next slide. So all SARE projects follow the sustainable model. So they are engaged in project projects that simultaneously address the three aspects of sustainability. So when you've often heard those referred to as social, economic and environmental. So it's the people who depend on the agriculture, protecting the nation's land and water, and then economic viability of the enterprise over the long term. So you will be asked in your grant project to to say how your project will address the social, the environmental and the economic aspects of of agriculture. You can go to the next one. We have recently worked on kind of trying to share what we see as the social sustainability aspect, because often our training is in the economic and the environmental. We know how to measure those things. We're not quite as good at measuring some of the social aspects. And so SARE outreach recently put together a bulletin that was actually led by my colleague, Aaron Schneider, who's on the call to help identify what kinds of things we're thinking of when we think of social sustainability. And maybe the kinds of things that you would be addressing in a social outcome. You can go to the next slide. So I said we have a very broad charge of sustainable practices to the whole of American agriculture. So this is just a list of some of the projects we funded over our 30 plus years, some of the areas we fund. And there are more of these. I know we've been funding a lot of a number of projects in food sovereignty lately, but, you know, integrated pest management, marketing and local food, water quality, high tunnels, season extensions, livestock, small ruminants, grazing, pollinators, urban ag. So if you think it fits sustainable ag, there's probably a place for it in this program. You can go to the next slide. OK, so now let's get into some of the specifics about the graduate student grant program. So this year, the total is $20,000. And if you looked at an old call for proposals, you'll see that that's an increase from the past. So your total project is $20,000. Ten percent of that can be indirect costs. And that's something that your institution and your faculty advisor will will explain a little better to you. It's basically overhead that your institution will take out to help administer your grant. So of that 20,000, you'll have 18,000 to spend, basically. These can be for as long as 36 months. Usually they're 12 to 24 months, depending on your graduate student program. They can be researched, but they can also be education or demonstration projects. And it does not have to be a part of your it does not have to be your actual thesis project, but it should be a part of your graduate program. And we realize that at this funding level, obviously, these are not funding your thesis, your whole thesis project, but it may fund a small part of it. Often we find it's the part that engages farmers and ranchers. So it might be that you've got your graduate suit, you've got your thesis project set up, but you want to do some kind of a publication or you want to do focus groups with farmers and ranchers around the research that you're doing. And those are the kinds of things that could be supported by this $20,000 grant. Again, a reminder that the proposals are due April 18th this year. And we fund about 20 proposals a year and we generally get between 40 and 60. So that's actually a pretty high funding rate. Your funds will be available until September 1st of 2024. So when you list your start date and when you're planning, you will not be able to be paying for anything that happens this growing season. It will have to start September 1st. And so you're kind of planning ahead for this. You can go to the next slide. So who can apply? So you do have to be enrolled in a graduate student degree program or a vet med resonance program at an accredited college or university when the funds are dispersed. And that that college or university does have to be in the US. And if you're not enrolled yet, that's fine. As long as after September 1, 2024, you will be enrolled as a graduate student. As a graduate student, you are the one who writes this proposal. A part of our reason for having this grant program isn't just to get the research and education that you will be giving us. It's also to train you to write grants and to manage grants. So we do require that you write the grant. But obviously, obviously we expect that you're going to have a lot of input and probably editing from your major advisor. But the grant should be written by you. You can go to the next one. So why should you apply? I just gave you one reason. So this gives you the experience of writing a grant. And it's a good, good way to start. It also introduces might be introducing you to sustainable ag principles and what applied research is. A lot of graduate students don't get a chance to work with farmers and ranchers. And we think this is a great opportunity to do that. Obviously, it helps you build a portfolio of published work and it builds a relationship between you and the producers and also Sarah, of course. You can go to the next slide. So in recent funding cycles, we've funded projects and natural resources, livestock systems, pest management, cropping systems and marketing. And you can view graduate student projects that have been funded recently by going to our projects, project reports section on the National SARE website. And on the next slide, I'll just show you a quick screenshot of how you do that. On the next slide. And that is projects.sare.org. Just go there and do search projects. And you can look up past their project to see how your work differs or builds on those past projects. Let's see. And I think you can go to the next slide. You can either search by project type. You can choose different years. You can choose our region or you can look at the other regions in the US and you can even choose a specific state. Looking for keywords, you plug it into that project reports part and it'll it'll bring up relevant projects. You can go to the next slide. So successful proposals demonstrate relevance to sustainable agriculture in the north central region. And sometimes that is really helpful if you give like the scope of the project, like if you are doing work on, let's say, insect damage on asparagus. You could say this is the, you know, this is the annual market value or this is the market value of asparagus in our state. And this is the damage done by this particular pest. So having those numbers or the number of acreage that might be affected by the work you're doing is always a good thing to have in that relevance. You want to be addressing the three broad based outcomes, which again, apply to how is this affecting social aspects, environmental aspects and economic aspects. And we actually asked that in three separate questions. So you can't avoid addressing all three broad based outcomes. I will say we realize that a project may emphasize one of those over the others. You may be doing a study that's primarily economics, enterprise budgets. But we do want you to give some thought about what the outcomes would be in those other two aspects as well. And the last there's a question now I can I'm happy to hold on if that is helpful or if there's a question that showed up in the chat. If it's a question that's relevant to a slide I'm on right now, that we go ahead and we can go ahead and do it. Well, there was more about relevance and applicability. So this is coming from our proposed work is not a part of a graduate program, but a demonstration project for a student organization at Iowa State University would just this person is curious to know if they're still eligible to apply. Well, as long as you're a graduate student writing the project, if it's a demonstration and it's adjacent to your thesis work somehow that would apply. And those kind of specific questions. If you have a question like that, you can go ahead and contact me later. I'm happy to set up a time to talk to you about the project you want to do and how you might approach that. So the last point I want to make on this slide is that you want to involve farmers and ranchers in your project. And that can be done in various ways. You might have an advisory team that that you talk about your research with and get ideas from them about what might be useful in the field or what might be practical in the field. Or if you're doing an on farm project, you could have the farmer rancher present with you at a field day or something like that. You can move on to the next slide. Successful proposals have clear outcomes and outcomes are not necessarily the results of your experiment or your, yeah, or the data that you get out of it. They're what will happen as a result of you doing the project. And I'll talk a little bit more about that. So it's, you know, you did the project, you shared the information about the project and what will change as a result of you doing that. And I will go over that a little bit because that's also kind of a new, a different concept sometimes. You want to have clear evaluation and outreach plans. So evaluation is what are you, what are you measuring in terms of what will change in the system and how will you share that information? And then you want to have a budget that's appropriate to the work. And so we ask reviewers not to scrutinize the budget too much. But if you are asking for a full-time student worker on your project, then they'll want to see that they really are going to be collecting samples or are working in the field, you know, for 40 hours a week for the time that you've allotted. So that's what we mean by appropriate to the work. You can go on to the next slide. So tips for submitting. You've heard what I said about SARE. We do practical applied research, pharma directed. We like the, we do systems research, address the three aspects of sustainability. Does your project fit that? Follow those instructions in the call for proposal. That's a good idea for now and into the future when, you know, print off those requests for applications or calls for proposals, underline the key things you need to do and make sure you follow through on those. Research your idea before applying. So you do that when you do your background research for your thesis project, you're all used to doing that. But reviewers do like to see that you have looked at the SARE projects database as well and know what kind of works been done on your topic and how your work is building off it or how your work is going to be different. And then have clear goals and objectives and make sure they align with your research methods. And last, don't wait until the last minute to begin your proposal. Next slide, you want to develop a realistic budget appropriate to the project. You want to have a clear evaluation and outreach plan. And I guess I told you, I'd say it over and over again, involve farmers or end users, right with reviewers in mind. And make sure you get someone else to prove read your proposal. That's really critical. And it may not be someone who's right in your area of work, either. One of the things with being a very program that covers so many different areas that our reviewers also have expertise in a lot of different areas. So they might be more generalists and they may not be specifically aware of some of the terminology that you would use in in a in your thesis proposal, perhaps. So make sure you write for a little bit of a broader audience. Don't use jargon. Specific point. There's another question in the chat that showed up. But are we able to connect with someone at the North Central chair office that can review our proposals and provide us with feedback before submission? Not so I you can contact me to talk about the topic, but I will not review a draft of your proposals. However, a state coordinator in your state might be able to do it if you give them plenty of time to look at it. And I'll get to that in another slide. So let's we'll keep moving on that. You can go to the next slide. Yeah, apply for a grant. So this is a great place to go for general grant writing tips and resources. Again, this is on our North Central chair website. And you would click on graduate student grant program. You can keep going, Marie. So here we just had this question. So contact your Sarah State coordinator. So under grant writing resources, if you scroll to the bottom, you'll see a section for Sarah State coordinators. If you click on that, it shows the 12 states in our region. It gives you contact information for our Sarah State coordinators. So go ahead and contact them. Give them plenty of time ahead of time. And they will most of them will read the draft of your proposal and give you some really good feedback. A lot of them have served on these review committees, so they know what Sarah is looking for. In addition, you can get help from the Michael Fields Ag Institute. That is an organization that provides free grant advising services in the Midwest, and that is also linked on that grant writing resources page. You can go to the next slide. I'm going to go just really quickly through some parts of the proposal. And I won't go through all of them, but just kind of to give you an idea of some of the parts that you need to really emphasize and to do a little bit more, give more explanation about some of these sections. There are word limits, and so it's helpful to put this in a word processing application so that you know what the words are and you can edit there before you cut and paste it into the system. So the first thing you do is write a summary. It's basically an abstract that is going to be used to publicize your project if it's funded. And you want to be concise, but you're going to put everything in there. You're going to put, you know, a sentence about the relevance, a sentence about the approach, a sentence about the outcomes you're trying to get. So you'll have to be concise, but it kind of is exactly what it says. It summarizes your whole proposal. Next slide. You have a brief project description that's different from the summary. It's a 75 word limit. It might be 160 characters, and this is just a real quick blurb. And it's used when people do Google searches. So that's the reason it's so limited. It will help people find your project if they put any of those keywords into a Google search. Next slide. So I told you, I'd say a little bit more about outcomes. So outcomes usually are referring to the education part of your project or the or the extension or the outreach of your project. So how you're sharing the information. So we talk about having two different types of projects. One is an education project. So if you are basically proposing to do a two or a three year project where you are just doing education, and so maybe you're proposing you're going to do post-harvest handling workshops, then you're going to have a lot of time to be able to check to see whether people who attended your workshops learned something new and whether they use something that they learned to change something that they're doing in their operation. So in that case, your learning outcome would be farmers will learn post-harvest handling and packing techniques for sales to institutions and the action that you would be measuring. You might do a follow up survey to see if farmers are using that post-harvest techniques, those post-harvest techniques to increase their sales to institutions. So you'll be able to actually measure that action item on that proposal. Then the next one is if you're doing a research project on the next slide. So if you're doing a research project and this is landscape diversity influences the pollinator population in vegetable crops. So you're going to spend two or three years collecting the data on that. And then at the end of that time, you're going to share what you learned. So you can measure the outcome of what the people who attend your seminar learn from your data. So farmers are going to learn that diverse landscape influence the number and types of pollinators. So they're going to learn that and you'll be able to measure that during your seminar. An action outcome would be that farmers are going to plant biodiverse plantings and then increase their pollinator population. But you won't have time to find that out probably. So we understand that when you're doing largely a research project, you're probably not going to be able to measure your your changes in behavior or the action outcomes from those. So and I know that may be the first time you're learning about outcomes as part what we used to call project program logic models. I know it can be a little confusing and please you can read up on it or you're welcome to talk to me about what your outcomes are. And I can help you figure that out as well. You can go to the next slide. Your project proposals, you're going to have the statement of the problem, the background and the justification. So what's been done, what's needed, what might the impact be and especially how is that going to affect again, the social, the economic and the environmental aspects of sustainability? And I should add here, a question I often get is, do you cite literature and you can, we say cite critical literature. It's not like in your thesis proposal where you have three pages of references cited. Reviewers really don't want to see a lot of references. They want critical citations, maybe for something that's a controversial point or a new approach or method because those lit citations are a part of the word count. So they do want a few of them if they're needed, but you don't need a huge list of literature cited. Next slide. The approach and methods is describe how you plan to carry out the work. And in this section, you are going to be referring to how farmers and ranchers are going to be involved. And if you're working with other partners, how they're going to be involved. This is the section where you include that. And this is a section that is looked at carefully by reviewers. So, yeah, make sure you get that reference to farmer rancher involvement in this section. Next slide. Outputs are the things that are going to be come out of the project, the products, so there'll be things like with an article or if you're going to do a fact sheet that you're going to share. Those are the types of things that are outputs or a workshop can be considered an output. So kind of outputs and activities. Next slide. And evaluation. So how do you know that you've succeeded or you're making progress toward your outcome? So what kind of things are you going to measure to know if people learn something at one of the outreach events that you had? And the most common way to do that is to do a survey and ask, you know, how did your how did your knowledge about pollinator populations increase as a result of attending this seminar or something like that? Next slide. And you will be asked to upload a summary table like this that has those expected outcomes, the outputs, the activities and inputs, and then the evaluation, how you plan to know whether you made progress toward your outcomes. Next slide. Then you'll also be expected to share an outreach plan. How do you plan to share this information? You may be presenting a poster at a workshop or at a national meeting. And the other section, you'll be filling out our experience and roles. So, you know, what kind of experience do you have? What kind of expertise does your faculty advisor have for doing this project? And what's your responsibility? What are you going to be doing in this in this project? And next slide. The budget and you have to fill out a justification with that as well. And I will tell you in our projects.serr.org online grant program that you use to submit your proposal. You feed in the budget items one by one. So make sure you allow plenty of time for inputting that budget. You might set it up as a spreadsheet to start with, but you cannot upload just a spreadsheet. You need to enter the items in. So you'll put in what your grant costs are and then justify how that is appropriate for your project and how you came up with that number. You also should be sure you budget for farmer compensation if it's appropriate. He goes to the next slide. There's a question in the chat about really specific to budgeting. And Jeanine asks, what type of equipment can we include in the budget? Like I want to include a handheld electric tool, for example. So that you should be able to do. So we consider when we say equipment, you can't you can't do motorized. What you can't do, I think it's motor vehicles, obviously which for $20,000, you're not going to be able to do anyway. We consider anything under $5,000 to be materials and supplies. So most of that is allowed. There are some more specific instructions in the call for proposals. They go through a bunch of things that you can and can't do for budgets. We can't fund infrastructure. But something like a hand tool, even electric hand tool should be allowable. That would be considered materials and supplies. You can go to the next slide. So there are about 20 slides here. And I'm going to go through these very quickly. Because again, these are the screenshots of the system to show you what it looks like. But I know that these will be more useful to you as you're actually in the program and going through it. And again, all these slides, including the screenshots, are available on the North Central SEAR website under apply for a grant in the Graduate Student System. So if you have never applied for a SEAR grant before, you're going to need to create an account. This is when you go to projects.SEAR.org. This is what you'll see. You can either log in if you already have an account or you can create an account. You go to the next slide. You're going to start a new grant proposal. And if you have already started and you're coming back to it, obviously you'll hit the manage my grant proposals. Go to the next slide. And you want to make sure you choose the North Central Graduate Student Grant Program. So choose the right region and the right program. So this is the Graduate Student Program. Next slide. And then you see where you have those edit buttons. You're going to fill in information, the title, the description. And once you do that, I think you get a check on it. Or the information that has an asterisk on it is required information. So you'll fill that information in. We do advise you to save as you go. It does not save typed in information until you hit save. So if you somehow get called away to do something and you just typed in a big paragraph and you didn't save it and it logs you out, you will lose it. So save often. You would click on cover and you go to the next slide. And then you'll see how to start entering information. So this is a cover page. You edit the start date, all that stuff. At any time you can go back to the main page that we just came from by clicking on proposal overview. Next slide. Required questions are marked with a check when they're completed. Go to the next slide. Some sections do allow you to add images or tables. So if it has that section that says add media, you can upload one of the things in the certain format. We don't want you to overuse that function. So what we say is don't upload more than about the equivalent of one two-sided page of material. But we know that if a picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes a plot map can really be beneficial in the approach and method section. So you do have that option of doing that. Just don't overuse it. Next section, next slide. You can also view a draft of your proposal at any time by clicking on that view draft, which will show you, it'll preview your proposal. And next slide I think says that you can also share that draft. I guess it skipped that part. So that the draft, you can also it will give you a URL that you can share with your advisor to look at it. You are the only one who can edit this proposal. So if you need someone to go in and do something directly on this, you'll have to share your login credentials. But you can share the draft for comments by using that draft button. So this is the budget and I did want to show you that because again you enter each item with a short item description, then the justification and the details. So when you click on add a budget item, this is what it will give you and you fill in those different amounts. And again, there's a big arrow by that save because it will add you to, it will allow you to keep adding budget items without saving. But again, if you get called away and you get logged out, you will lose what you entered. So I advise you to save each time. Go ahead and to the next slide. I think this shows where you have completed the information for personnel salary wages. So you're going to have a student helping and that's going to be at $3,000. And your justification for that was 20 hours per week or 10 weeks at $15 an hour. So that's the kind of information that you fill out for each of your budget items. Next slide. So this is one that you've entered and then you know that your total costs here are $3,500. So then you can add in that last piece of an indirect cost, which is 10% of that direct cost. So that's 350 and you would add that I think on the next slide. So then you add in that 350 for direct cost total. And that is what your budget will look like. Next slide. We do ask that you have letters verifying participation, not necessarily support letters from people saying, yeah, this is a great project, but letters from the organizations that are actually working with you on the project, especially if you have participating farmers and ranchers. As I say here, you don't have to have the letter. If you have some documentation of their commitment, it's often a lot easier for someone to send an email and that's fine. If you want to upload a PDF of the email, that works as well. That letter should maybe say a little bit about who they are and what they think they're doing on the project and why they're interested in helping you with the project. That's always a kind of nice personal touch to each letter that reviewers appreciate. Next slide. So adding uploading materials can be a little bit cumbersome. So as graduate students, you probably will not have an issue with this, but we do include the screenshots just so you see how you would add the file. And then it goes into a upload and then you have to select that file in order to upload it to your proposal project. Next slide. And this again goes through those steps. It uploads it into the directory and then you have to go ahead and add it by clicking OK. I think it actually says now insert or something like that, but there's something in that corner of the media library that you need to click on and then it will upload it to the application. I see the chat. I don't always notice the chat, but there is not a minimum or a maximum for support letters. Although I will say that again, the letters verifying participation and reviewers are not swayed by a bunch of support letters. So what they're really looking for are letters making sure the people who said they're going to participate in your project are going to participate and understand what they're going to do. So I would say in general, two to five letters is more than enough and usually it's closer to maybe two or three or if you're just working closely with one farmer, it might be one farmer who writes a letter. Next slide. And this is just showing what it looks like once you've uploaded the file to the system. So it'll be in there and you can add another file if you want. Is there a difference between a support letter and a participation letter? Yeah, a support letter like might come from NRCS saying, well, it wouldn't come from NRCS because they don't write support letters. So it might come from someone who's a non-profit organization, your area that says, yes, water quality is a big concern in our area. And so this is a really good project. So that's a letter of support for kind of the concept and a letter of verifying participation is someone who's actually going to participate in your on your project. So it might be the farmer whose field you're going to monitor water runoff from to test quality. Then that person, he or she would write a letter verifying participation. Next slide. So this is the last step that you have to do before actually hitting submit on your proposal. And this is where your organization verifies that they're supporting you submitting this proposal. So this will be your college or university grants administration office. And the way we have you do this is you're going to send your your proposal into them. They're primarily going to be concerned with the budget making sure that's compliant. You'll probably need to also give them the call for proposals so they can see what's being requested. And then this application sign off sheet downloads a PDF that they complete. They can scan it and then send it back to you to upload with your proposal. That's a little different from some other programs where you send it to them and they enter all the information. Some institutions do want to do that. And then they'll need your login credentials to do that. But however it's done, you need someone from your grants office to sign off on your proposal. That needs to be uploaded with your proposal in order for you to submit. And that must be done by that April 18th deadline. So again, plan ahead, talk to your advisor or to your grants office to find out how much time they require to process that before sending it in. It used to be sometimes as long as a week. Sometimes it's closer to three or four days, but make sure you know what the rules are at your institution. It does have to be the grants administration office. Your advisor will also sign it, but this is the institution indicating that they're willing to support this project. And that's because they are, they're the ones who will have the contract. They'll hold the contract. The funding doesn't come to you, it gets managed through your institution. So that's why they have to sign off on it. Next slide. And I think we're almost at the end of the screenshots. You and your advisor will sign that, that's us, that sheet, and then you'll send it to your institution's grant office to complete and sign. And then you'll upload that signed PDF to your proposal. Next slide. So this is the link to share the draft with collaborators so they can look at it. Again, they can't edit using that link, but they can send you information back and you can edit or you can share your login credentials with them if you're willing to do that, and they can directly edit. Next slide. So once you're satisfied with your proposal and you've got, it will show you if you haven't completed information and that submit proposal button lights up with that dark green when all the sections are completed and you're ready to go, and you would click submit proposal. Next slide. And then you actually can, this is all you'll see when you submit your proposal. You'll see that you've submitted it. You do have the option of unsubmitting the proposal. If you submit it and you look through it and you see, oh man, there's a typo in the summary. I better correct that. You can pull it back and resubmit, but you have to resubmit by that April 18th deadline. Next slide. When you go back to your login page under manage grant applications, you'll see that your proposal is submitted. So that's a way for you to kind of check. Next slide. Okay, that's it for the screenshots of the application system. So this is just, again, an overview of the timeline. The grants are due April 18th. In case you haven't heard me say that 20 times already. By late July, you will hear whether you have been funded or not funded. August, our grants and contracts person Gene Andreasen will look over your budget. We don't turn projects away because they have something wrong in the budget. That will not be a reason that you are not funded. So Gene will go over the budget with you if she has questions, or if there's something that needs to be fixed, she'll go over that with you, and then we send it to our grants office to finalize the contract. We do that as quickly as we can. Sometimes it takes a little while. The funds are available by September 1st, and you can use the start date of September 1st. I will tell you that once in a while the contracts are not signed by September 1st, but you can start spending funds September 1st, even if the contract isn't signed. As long as we know that's your start date, and you have the letter notifying you that you're funded. And then you do have annual reporting requirements. So your first report, because you're funded September 1st, we don't expect to report that first calendar year. So you will not file a 2024 report, but you will file a report on everything you've done from September 1st through 2025, and that will be due March 1st of 2026. Unless your project ends by the end of December of 2025, and then your final report is due 60 days after the project deadline. You can go ahead and go to the next slide. So things to remember involve farmers or end users, budget appropriate for work, follow the guidelines, read the call for proposals, and get your proposal in by four o'clock on April 18th. And this last slide is the contact information for me. And for our office, you can go to the next slide. So again, you can reach me by email. You can phone, leave a voicemail message. If I don't answer, I've worked part of my time remotely, and part of my time in the office. And you can also contact the NCR main office. And I think that's it. I am, are there other questions? So Erin, I'll let you queue them up. Sure, Beth. So there are a couple related questions here. One was about kind of the timeline of things. So there's a question that if we are awarded and graduate before our grant timeline is completed, are we still able to continue on with the project until our funds are spent? Yes, within reason. So and part of that is because we know sometimes you don't finish when you think you're going to finish either. So sometimes that gets extended. We do let you go a little bit beyond your graduation date because we do know that's kind of unpredictable. We wouldn't let you go a year beyond your graduation date. So if you're just getting ready to graduate, like in December, that might be a little tight. But again, call me with your specific situation if that didn't really answer your question. Another kind of related timeline question. This one is if kind of their general project has started before September 1st of 2024, would it be eligible for this grant? So they weren't clear on that point and ask for clarification. Yes. So it is eligible and as long as you can't pay for anything that happens before September 1st. So like if you're gathering data and you've got a student helping you, you cannot back pay that student for the time before September 1st. But again, because we know these are only funding a part of a project, it may well be that you've started to collect data or you've started work. One thing that reviewers do like to see is that you explain that though in the proposal. That maybe you're going to be planting a first year this year and you will have some data by the time this project starts, but you're going to be doing an additional year. Reviewers like to know what part of this has already been done and what you already know and what part specifically your proposed project is funding. Another question about eligibility. So this one person as Alyssa asked, my project will be based on three Bison ranches around Perkins County in South Dakota, but they're registered as a PhD student at Colorado State University. Would they be eligible to apply? So in the north, this is where the regional priorities and regional rules come into effect. So in the north central region, we would consider you eligible to apply because your project is primarily affecting sustainable agriculture in the north central region. So you would be eligible to apply. I think in the other regions, you're not eligible. Your institution has to be within the region's borders. So but contact me about that if you have questions. We have funded projects outside of our region that are primarily taking place in the north central region. There's a couple of questions that came in about language. One of them is there a difference between a support letter and a participation letter? I believe I already answered that. So a support letter is one that kind of voices general support for the concept of the project. And we don't really require those. The participation letter is one from someone who's actively participating on the project. And it kind of verifies what they understand they're going to be doing as a part of your project. Thanks for that reiteration. And you may have answered this and I did earlier, but they ask, can you expand on social sustainability again? So first of all, I would send you to that referenced document to talk about social sustainability. But it talks about basically quality of life. So is if you're proposing some kind of a new practice that would save a farmer time, then you could say this would improve his quality of life because he'll have more time to attend his son or daughter's softball games or something like that. I know we actually had a situation like that where someone had an automatic milker for a fairly small dairy herd. And he said the biggest part of that, maybe cost wise, it didn't cost him, it kind of broke even, but he was able to attend his grandson's baseball games and he had missed all of his sons because they were at milking time. So those are the kinds of things that are quality of life or does it diminish the stress on the farm family? How is it good for the community? Does it diminish stress in the community? Is there local food access that there wasn't before? Those are the kinds of things that are social sustainability, but look at that document. There are some nice examples there and there are also some examples of projects that have actually totally looked at social sustainability. Any other questions? I am not seeing any in the chat. Well, that's great. It's good we're on this slide with my contact information. So again, this Marie has recorded this webinar and it will be posted on the graduate student web page of the North Central Sierra website. And you're welcome to contact me if you have questions. I will say sometimes get back more quickly by email because I can answer those off hours. I don't return phone calls off office hour time, but you're welcome to contact me and do get in touch with your state coordinator. I think that they can be really a big help to you in helping with your proposal. And I thank you for your time. We look forward to getting your proposal. Thanks.