 Welcome to those of you that have joined us for today's webinar on the North Central SAR professional development program grant opportunity that we have. And I am Rob Myers. I am a faculty member at the University of Missouri, but serve as the coordinator for the professional development program. And we'll be walking you through some tips on applying for the SAR grants. We have several different grants that we offer through North Central SAR and each of them has different deadlines. So this is the one that is coming up soonest and happy to be able to go through this with you and then we'll take some questions afterwards if you have any. So with that I'll go ahead and get started. First of all, as we're looking at these grants these are something that you can get to by looking at our website which is the North Central SAR website. So you can get to that either through the SAR main homepage sarah.org or you can go through NCR SAR's web page. SAR is a grants and outreach program to advance sustainable innovations in the whole of American agriculture. So it's a very broad-based program. We work with farms and projects of all types and sizes. We do try to emphasize that SAR is a bottom-up grants program certainly science-based but very practical and problem-solving oriented and try to be inclusive for diverse audiences. The grants that we offer are competitive so the people that apply are competing against other applicants. Normally with our professional development grant program we fund around a third of the applications but it varies from year to year what the exact percentage is. One thing to be aware of is that we do have a variety of resources available in terms of background material that's through our SAR outreach program. Some of these may be helpful to you as references while you're preparing your application or just in general or some of the programs you do and particularly as you're doing education outreach training for other audiences these may be helpful. So we have about 20 different books a similar number of bulletins and lots and lots of fact sheets and videos. All these are available for free online. The books if you order a print copy there is a nominal charge but the fact sheets and bulletins are available for free either to download as a PDF or you can actually request print copies of all our bulletins for free including in volume. So just to talk a bit more about our overall grant program as I mentioned we have six different grant programs we offer with the professional development program we're focusing on today being one of them. SAR is organized into four different regions so you can see the north central region that we're talking about today is 12 states from the Dakotas down to Kansas over to Michigan and Ohio. Now if you are from outside that region a question that may come up is can you apply for a grant with north central SAR even if you live for example in Colorado or Kentucky the answer is yes as long as the proposal is primarily focused on benefiting the north central SAR region. It can be a project that crosses state lines for example you could have a project that was covering both North Dakota and Montana but we would expect the majority the activity in other words at least 51% of the activity would be within the north central region. So the SAR model is based on the idea that there are three legs to the stool that we're looking at not only the profitability of agriculture but protection of the nation's land and water resources in other words the environmental aspects of sustainability and then the social or people part of sustainable agriculture is very important as well so all three of these aspects are important now these projects at $120,000 aren't huge so we realize that your project may emphasize one of these areas a little more than another it may be a little more focused on profitability or environmental aspects or it could certainly be focused on the social sustainability angle but we definitely like it if you can talk about those three areas of benefits to your project and on this social sustainability topic we know that this has been a tough one sometimes for people to address really for any of us that work in this area it's it's a bit more challenging maybe than the other aspects so to that end SAR undertook an effort to kind of better define and outline some approaches with social sustainability and you could find those at this URL and by the way these slides will be available you don't have to write down that whole URL right now we'll have that available to you later what do we fund well a very wide range of topics I often tell people you don't have to come in with a very broad sustainable proposal it most of our proposals are somewhat more narrow than that you know they're focused on any of the topics you see here or many others so it's not unusual to get a proposal that is just on something like high tunnels or specifically on poultry training or maybe on pollinators just as a few of many examples and you can see our past projects that have been funded on our website so getting down to some specifics with the professional development program these are competitive grants that are up to a hundred and twenty thousand dollars these are aimed at agriculture educators who are training other agriculture educators so I want to emphasize this point very important these are not projects to just do education for farmers if you want to do a project that is just focused on education for farmers we have some other grant programs dedicated to that so for example our research and education program you can put in an education only proposal specifically targeted to farmers for that program which is up to 250,000 or our partnerships program which is a somewhat smaller at $50,000 cap those can be targeted to just education of farmers but the professional development is really more about training for other ag educators these are proposals that are due April 6th you're going to hear me repeat that deadline a couple times we will let you know about your success of your application by August 1st and then the funds would be available no later than October 1st now I want to make you also aware that within the professional development program we offer more than just these competitive grants we also support state coordinators in the 12 north central states so we have one or two people in each of those states that works as a state coordinator or co-coordinator and they also have some funds to allocate but it's a pretty modest pot of funds they can support travel scholarships or mini grants mini grants are typically quite small like a thousand to three thousand dollars but if you just wanted to put on one small workshop or a field day you maybe don't need to go for a whole hundred and twenty thousand dollar proposal you could talk to your state coordinator about a project in that area so who can apply for these north central serr professional development program grants the majority of applications come from either colleges or universities or non-profit organizations that's by far most of our our successful grants are from those two types of organizations however almost every year we do fund another type of group sometimes we funded proposals from a soil and water district or somebody with a state or federal agency or any other type of organization that is doing sustainable ag training or education programs can apply who are these grants targeted to as far as the audience i mentioned they're not intended to be focused specifically on farmers now you can have an event that farmers participate in but the primary audience should be one of the groups listed here i would say extension educators is our number one priority based on our federal statute supporting the serr program we also have a mandate to do training that includes when appropriate natural resource conservation service or nrcs educators it's not uncommon to see training programs include some of these other folks though soil water district staff state agency staff non-profit educators voteek ag teachers or even private sector farm advisors so your project could target any one of these groups or a cross section of these groups and it really doesn't matter you're not going to get more points or less points if you just have one of these groups versus several of the groups but the main thing is you spell out who you are targeting that's very important now again i want to emphasize let's say you're having a week-long workshop is a core part of what you're doing and you're expecting to have 30 people you can have a few farmers come to that event maybe there are speakers for one thing but the whole audience should not be farmers it should be primarily an audience of some of these educators mentioned here what types of activities can we fund well pretty broad cross section but it's all related to professional development helping people get more skills expertise knowledge abilities in the sustainable ag area so probably the most common thing we find is some type of workshop they may be called something else but we also fund webinars now i would tell you our reviewers usually don't get too excited about a proposal that is nothing but webinars of course during covid we ended up doing that with distance education and you might have a good case for doing a program that is just webinars maybe you're trying to reach people all across the north central region and that might be an argument for doing nothing but webinars but i would say our reviewers often like to see a couple different strategies so you might do an in-person workshop complemented by some webinars or you may do some videos as an alternative to webinars we have had some projects that have focused heavily on kind of field-based experiential education people going out of the field maybe getting some chance to do some hands-on activities related to bus tours we've occasionally seen projects that either as their primary focus or more often is just a component of the project added a special training session to an existing conference we've had some projects that were kind of more in-depth like training academies that were kind of a smaller number of people being trained but for a prolonged period of time at least a week sometimes more and it could be some other type of professional development but these would just be some examples of the type of format of training that we often see in successful proposals so the use of the funds as you can imagine can certainly be for salaries and benefits we realize in today's environment that we've got to pay for the people doing this work so it's not uncommon with the professional development grants that a significant part of the budget goes to salaries and benefits we can pay for speaker honorariums and if you're involving farmers as speakers or in other ways and the project is as resource people we highly recommend that you provide some type of compensation to that farmer and an honorarium would be a really common way of doing that you can have consultants and pay their fees certainly you can have some travel and office expenses we do allow meals and refreshments if they're needed for the continuity of the meeting so for example let's say you're having an event that's going from 10 until 4 it would be very appropriate to include some money for lunch maybe for the afternoon break but in that case if the program is ending at 4 we don't based on USDA rules have the ability to pay for like an evening banquet if you're going to do that then you need to have an educational program that extends into the evening like an after-dinner speaker on an educational topic we can pay for video developments for facility and AV rental fees and we don't pay for equipment necessarily like going out and buying a tractor or we can't pay for capital costs like building a fixed greenhouse so it really needs to be some of these things I'm outlining there okay let's talk about the sections of the proposal really these proposals are it's going to look like a lot when I go through it but I'll tell you when you put all this together it's not a super long proposal you know not as long as like a NIFA AFRI proposal that might be 18 pages these are certainly shorter than that so like any proposal we ask that you provide a summary what you might think of as an abstract for some programs these are limited to 250 words we ask that you identify who that audience is as an extension educators or as a NRCS or some other group that we have a brief description of outcomes I'll talk more about outcomes in a moment and that you briefly describe your activities other components of the proposal in terms of the main narrative you're going to have a background section that's what you'd expect just telling a little bit about why this is an important topic area inputs is something a little unique to this particular grant program what are the people and resources you're going to use on this project who's going to be helping with the training and you know that could be a cross-section of folks including farmers helping his trainers we really want to see specific activities I would say this is a common reason projects don't get funded is they don't have a good description of the activities they may say well we'd like to have you know over a three-year period we'd like to do three webinars a year and they're going to be on water quality and then they don't give us any specifics so if you're going to have a workshop tell us about how long that work scopes going to last we don't need to know what day you're going to do it on but you know is this going to be something you do in the winter how how many people are coming to that workshop what type of content give us some specifics on the content as many specifics as you can provide is going to improve your chances of success with these proposals timeline is a specific we're looking for when do you expect these events to happen now you're not locked into this we know things can change but this gives us an idea that you thought through all this is going to work and then a little bit unique to these professional development grants you may be used to competitions where you're asked to have some objectives and some activities in relation to the objectives we're a little bit more focused around outcomes and outputs so outputs are the particular things you're going to be delivering it could be some educational materials like workbooks videos other materials podcast who you're going to be partnering with if that is relevant and then again the number of people you expect to train and what type of educators and the outcomes is a really important part of the proposal what do you expect to change and the people being trained so do you expect them to get more knowledge of how to do soil health testing maybe or that you expect them to be more knowledgeable about food safety rules and how are they going to get those skills so that they can eventually these educators impact farmers because that's the long-term goal these projects that the educators will get more knowledgeable more expertise so that they can down the road deliver that knowledge and information to farmers we do like to see an evaluation section if you don't write much about evaluation you're probably not going to get funded so try to be specific what steps you're going to take many times people do a pre and post test and you can also do a follow-up test you know maybe six or 12 months after a workshop key personnel we're asking you to describe what role each person is going to play now if they are a key member of the project we want a two-page CV not a longer one just two pages or less however we don't need a CV for like a farmer that's an advisor or just a speaker or other speakers it really should be like maybe the two to four people that are really the the key individuals on the project that you're providing a CV for one document we do ask for that you upload as a PDF is a one-page logic model and this is a template that we have a link to through the National Institute of Food and Ag you can use a different template for your logic model if you have one you like a little better but it basically needs to have about these same components the inputs activities outputs and outcomes so when we talk about outcomes if you're not real familiar with that I would encourage you to read up a little bit more about it before you write your proposal but we're looking for these changes in knowledge and that could be a variety of things including improved skills and then what actions do we expect those people being trained to take and how is that going to improve things is it going to lead to better livestock health is it going to lead to more use of cover crops is it going to lead to more diversified cropping systems could be any number of things but those outcomes are really more about the impact rather than just saying well we're going to you know have these videos or we're going to have these field days okay budgets um again these are limited to 120 000 now the good news is sarah caps all of our grants at a 10 indirect so the money does go a little bit farther than some USDA grants where your institution may be taking a higher level of indirect if you are involving farmers in these projects we strongly recommend that you compensate that farmer in some fashion that can be an hourly rate or just a straight honorarium whatever makes sense for your project and of course your expenditures should align with the goals and outcomes you have so again if you're doing a project training people to graft tomatoes don't expect to be able to just throw a rototiller in the budget and get it funded you know you need to if you're going to ask for something like that it really needs to be a clearer part of the training activity now letters this is a common source of confusion if you are writing another group in for receiving some funds we do need a letter from them as a collaborator if you are having somebody just be a speaker or not receiving any compensation other than maybe their travel we don't need a letter from that person that's going to be a speaker we don't need a letter from somebody that's going to be just an unpaid advisor and we don't want just general letters of support that's a little different than a lot of other programs out there including our research programs so this is just something the committee asked to not get these general letters of support so only provide a letter if it's a group getting a subcontract on the budget now how do you get to the applications well you can get in there either through our main ncr sarah website or through our project management system projects.sara.org i'm going to start with that latter site because it also has some good resources for you which includes being able to look at past professional development program projects so you can go look and see what's been funded in recent years you can read about those projects you'll see contact information maybe there's somebody in your state that's had one of these grants it'd be great to talk to them to learn a little bit about how they approached it so i would definitely spend a little bit of time at the at a minimum looking and seeing what other types of projects have been done with professional development grants in the region you can search by topic and you might look at other sarah grants besides just the pdp ones to see what's been done on the topic area you're looking at so definitely take use of this pretty easy to use search tool and just as an example of what the search page looks like you can search by region by states by project type by time period i would encourage you to focus on more recent years to get a flavor for what reviewers are prioritizing now just one little tip i find it more helpful to put the keywords into the project reports field that you see there above the red arrow rather than in the title so let's say you're wanting to look at pollinators you can search obviously in the the title box but you may miss a lot of projects that are including pollinator focus but just didn't happen to say the word pollinators in the title pretty obvious okay another thing that's on this page but you can also find it on our main ncr sarah website is our list of sarah state coordinators we encourage you to talk to your sarah state coordinator again some states have co-coordinators doesn't have to be a long conversation maybe just touch base with them for 10 or 15 minutes about your project idea and and see what kind of feedback they can offer you that may help you refine your proposal to make it more likely to be funded so you can get into the application system again through the project sarah.org or through the ncr sarah web page in this case when you're in the grant management system you if you've already got an account with north central sarah you can just log in at that button or you can create an account a little farther down you see a green box for create an account if you forget your password no problem just like a lot of sites you can reset your password so once you start a new proposal you're going to see some screens like this so as you're working through the system one thing to know is that as you've filled out and particularly area successfully there'll be a green check mark appearing and that'll only show once you've saved the information you've typed in so it could be a start date you can see right below that the end date has a red asterisk because that information has not been entered you're going to have to click on edit the answer to put in that end date and then you'll get a after you've saved it you'll get a green checkbox to show you finish that part we asked that you attach some key documents I showed you a logic model and here's a link that's within the website or the the grant portal to get you to the standard template but if you want to use a similar one that's okay again attach those page CVs of no more than two pages and again that's just the main project investigator or co-pis you don't need to provide it again just for speakers and so on and then I have not yet mentioned that there's an application sign-off sheet so you'll need to provide that as you work on the system as well where your organization sign-off person provides their signature so some key things to remember are that we have this deadline of April 6th that's a 4 p.m. central time that's because our IT staff are east coast and they stop work at five so if there's any technical issues we want to be sure to get those resolved so be sure to get that proposal in by 4 p.m. central time on April 6th and if you have any questions here's my contact information you can also contact our main office to get some additional information so with that I am going to turn it over to Marie and we will take any questions that you have. So if you have any questions there's a few different ways you can share you can raise your hand and I can unmute you so you can just ask your question you can also put it in the chat or put it in the Q&A and we will get to your question. So nonprofits are eligible for these grants and again they don't have to be based in the north central region you could be with a nonprofit that is national in scope or based outside the region we just asked that the majority of the work at least 51 percent be focused on one or more parts of the north central region the 12 state area. Somebody asked if you're I'm a postdoc in the US from another country yes we have no restrictions on where you're from we again just keep in mind that the majority of grants go to universities and nonprofits so if you're doing a postdoc assume you're affiliated with the university and it can be a university outside the region but the work would need to be focused on the north central region. A question about what is a CV so this is your resume a two-page resume or one-page resume CV meaning curriculum vitae who reviews and scores these applications on the professional development grants is usually a mix well so sometimes we have we have a committee and then we sometimes split it but I'll just talk about the committee in general so the committee has at least one or two farmers on it normally one or two people from a nonprofit organization a couple of university folks and then typically we'll have somebody from a state or federal agency so it's a pretty diverse group occasionally we have an agribusiness person on there depending on the year but there's always university nonprofit and farmers involved in the review just mean asked where can this recording or these slides be found after this meeting we'll post them on the professional development grant page on the north central region SARE website okay there's a question if you currently have a SARE PDP project going are there any limitations to applying for another one at the same time no obviously you'd want it to be a different project a clearly defined separate activity the other option is if you're really wanting to build on some work you're already doing in a PDP project it probably be better to wait till that project is wrapping up if you're if it's really kind of building on that earlier one but if it's a completely different project or activity yes you can apply again there's a few more questions in the Q&A Rob oh I needed to scroll down okay let's see so the second type of grant so besides the professional development grant north central SARE offers five other types of grants I had mentioned a couple other ones for people interested in doing education focused projects and specifically if you're wanting to do an education program that's targeted solely to farmers then you would not want to apply for this professional development program instead I would recommend you look at one of two options either our research and education grants which the name is a little misleading the grants can be strictly education the majority of them include research but they we have a aspect of that research and education grant program where people apply to just do an education project and those only compete against other education projects so every year we get several proposals for education only projects now those don't have to be exclusively farmers but most of them would be primarily focused on farmer education we also offer the partnership grants and those can be research or demonstration or education or marketing projects those have to involve three or more farmers you could do an education program with a group of farmers in a particular area and those are up to 50 000 whereas the research and education are up to 250 000 both of those grants are due in the fall the professional development one again is due April 6th okay a question about matching these none of the serra grants require any match whatsoever we don't even ask you if you have a match so good good news on that front uh Stephanie is asking would a project educating staff from economic development groups such as small business centers or non ag lenders uh on the needs of sustainable ag producers be eligible absolutely we definitely would consider any of those groups the only thing I would say is if you're if you think it's a little unclear how the folks you're working with are going to be educators eventually two farmers just explain what they do and how they're going to down the road impact farmers so for example if they're with a small business development center you might talk about what role does that staff person play and eventually helping farmers be more sustainable with their activities next question was about can we focus on veterans uh yes we have funded quite a few projects on veterans and they also the questions about respective social benefits enterprise not sure I know exactly what the intent of that phrase is but if it's just kind of like what can veterans bring to the table in terms of societal benefits certainly that's of interest and how they it's got to be connected to sustainable agriculture in some fashion so if it's about veterans returning to the farm or veterans learning how to be farmers those would be things of interest and again we funded some some work in that area okay here's one from the chat side what's the biggest mistake you see applicants make I would say the most common thing that shoots down proposals is that people do not provide enough details about their activities so I gave that example earlier that you might just say well we're going to do you know some workshops on goat diseases and yeah we're we're going to have some farmer speakers and we're going to have some extension educators come and you just don't give any you don't tell how long the training is going to be what's going to be covered who the audience is going to be how often the training is going to be happening so you need those specifics and then like what would be the review committee's biggest pet peeve well this is just another common maybe mistake applicants make is they just assume that their topic is a really good fit with sustainable ag but they don't offer any reasons why they think it fits with sustainable ag so I hesitate to pick a topic because any topic could be relevant sustainable ag but let's let's just say you're going to do something on tree production and you may think well this is really sustainable but it may not be clear how it relates to sustainable food and farming and maybe it's on walnuts I'm just picking something out of the air here and what you're really thinking about is how can we get more supply of walnut timber and that that's going to be good for soil carbon and it could that could fit with farming but you need to kind of talk about how it's going to add to farmers profitability how it is going to be good for the environment so don't take it for granted that your audience knows what is sustainable about your project you really want to spell that out even if it seems obvious to you well Marie I'm not seeing any more questions coming in so folks if you have questions as you're working on your proposal don't hesitate to reach out to me and again there'll be some more information online on our website ncr sarah and Marie will be posting that recording Marie do you know about when that will be posted probably back tomorrow yeah okay all right well we thank all of you for being on I certainly encourage you to pursue an application and if you just wanted to check and see if your project idea makes sense drop me a note or give me a call and we'll try to help you think through that and then again with specifics happy to help with that as well so appreciate you joining us today thanks