 HBCUs over the better part of the last eight years have been really making strives to encourage more interface and cooperation with the United States government for international and domestic research. But a new report suggests that HBCUs and the United States Agency for International Development may be crossing each other in a not so fortunate way and there are opportunities that may be missed. And here to talk today about chances for the HBCUs and USAID to work in more close proximity, Chanel Chambers-Hale, she's an elite research with our tech network, and Dr. Perlene Tyson, also a lead researcher with our tech who both issued the report talking about these cross sections of collaboration and better knowledge between the two sectors. So ladies, I appreciate your time today. Thank you for having us. Thank you. So let's talk about the overwhelming data that you guys found. And Dr. Tyson, I'll begin with you. USAID is an organization that funds international development in partnership with organizations working domestically here in the United States, heavily invested in higher education institutions. HBCUs, who do very well in terms of recruiting students from international countries, who do very well in terms of diplomacy and preparation for international work, are missing opportunities from this agency. Talk a little bit about what created the interest in this kind of survey and the results that you found in working with the HBCUs and with USAID. Well, the initial thought for the research was actually conducted by the MSI coordinator. His name was John Watson. He is actually an HBCU alumni from Hampton University. And he really wanted to show the value of HBCUs to USAID staff and USAID administration so they'll know about the capabilities of HBCUs, the values of them, and the work that they're currently doing. So that was the initial reason for the study to be conducted. From our actual research in working with HBCUs and USAID, we found that both from the organization standpoint and from HBCUs that they really wanted to collaborate, but they just didn't know what were the threats to bring them together. And so our work was really to look at what are some of those barriers and what are some recommendations that we could provide from the surveys and the interviews that they could use to kind of thread that needle and figure out how could they collaborate. Chanel, you are a Spelman College graduate, one of the institutions that are known for sisters being heavily involved in this exact kind of work for international relations and development. How were the schools identified to participate in the survey? And what surprised you most from their perspective about what they felt were missing from the interfacing opportunities? Yeah, well, first, we reached out to all 101 HBCUs via phone and email to administrators, offices of institutional research, and where appropriate deans and faculty. And given the time of year, given the difficulties of COVID, we were able to hear from around 58 of those institutions via interview or survey. So we hear from everyone. What surprised me the most was sort of as an HBCU alum and who was just sort of a proud proponent of the resources and just expertise at HBCUs, I was even taking sort of the wide array of expertise, of areas of expertise that each of these HBCUs, as I was talking to, even the community colleges, the faith-based institutions. I was I was even, you know, my obviously my alma mater is Spelman College, so I will represent them forever. But my sister school then at college, I was just amazed at sort of the intersectional feminist work that they were doing and how that sort of is engaged in every aspect in health and education from a global focus. And I mean, it was just so easy for me when I wrote the report to sort of make the case that this is this is really a valuable untapped resource for USAID. And I say that as a former USAID person. I worked there for six years and never got to engage with HBCUs. And I just in what was maybe more surprising than I thought it would be was just how much how much value there is and how much untapped resources there are. That's interesting that one of the things that stood out to me about the report is that there was a I guess a control, so to speak for, you know, how many people had the academic and the work experience credentials to say you can implement some of the things that USAID is looking for. And the answer was many of the folks that are at HBCUs could do that. But they didn't have the the awareness of a lot of the programs or they felt like institutionally, they didn't have the capacity to implement many of these things. Talk a little bit more about that part, because I think that that is a significant element. And this is for both of you where people who are practitioners and researchers and feel like, yeah, we can do that work. I don't know if the school is going to put a lot of money behind it. I don't know if I'm going to have the the staff to help with this. Talk a little bit more about that discovery in the survey. I'll start with one big one. It was the the offices of offices of institutional resource researchers, institutional research, excuse me, are much smaller at HBCUs. And they are at PWIs. And I say that now as a PWI as well, where my own institution has around close to 100 people in their offices of institutional research who can focus on what types of grants to go for, help you write the grants, target them and, you know, strategize some of these HBCUs that most maybe have five people working there. And that that that is a huge detriment, especially when trying to get funding from USAID, which is also a large and bureaucratic and diverse organization, which one size does not fit all for funding for fellowships, everything. So you really need to have people targeted on how to get funding from that particular institution. And HBCUs simply don't have those resources right now, even though they have the expertise and I don't really have a couple others. I would also add that the matching requirement that USAID has compared to other government agencies. So we actually looked at 28 solicitations just to see the matching requirements, and almost all of them had a matching requirements, which already weeds out HBCUs that may not have the capacity, the monetary capacity to be able to have that matching requirement. And also they do not do staff building like they don't pay for staff. So all this capacity building is not something that USAID pays for. So that's not a part of a grant. So a lot of times if you are at an HBCU and you see a five million dollar USAID grant and that you want to go for, you also need to be prepared to provide a match for that five million, which already weeds out small liberal colleges or smaller institutions. And especially during this time of COVID where other HBCUs are even struggling with enrollment, which we found when we were doing our interviews. Just for people who are who may be listening to this, who are well versed in like the research or grant making nomenclature, you say match. That's resources that the school has to have up front to be able to say we want a five million dollar grant and we have five million dollars available. Right. Yes. Yes. So that's a that's a requirement of even the cooperative agreements. And that's so tough because we hear this with agricultural funding that states need to be equipped to match it or the institutions need to be equipped to match it. So do you think that that's a that's a that's a government problem where smaller institutions, they don't have to be HBCUs, but just smaller institutions or liberal arts focused institutions aren't equipped financially to even compete, even though they have the talent pipeline, even if they have the knowledge base, they can't even compete because it's a question of cash on hand. Even a nonprofit. So I mean, even any organization that is trying to compete for a cooperative agreement or a grant would not have that capacity that you can have where you could say some staff funding. You can do some in kind costs, but to come up with five million and in kind cause with space and staffing is almost impossible for a lot of these institutions. So it just weeds them out. And so the one thing that they one of our recommendation was is just to take out the matching costs because you're losing talent when you have that requirement and a lot of HBCUs will say, I think, and even in our report, we talk about South Carolina State. This is that's one of the first things that they look at is how much is the match going to be? Do we have the money to be able to support this grant? So now the other thing that was interesting and we hear this so often, not just in in, you know, federal opportunities, but in private companies that are looking to hire HBCUs and establish pipelines. We saw this with Google a couple of months ago. Is that when they see schools that the name doesn't automatically pop to them? If it's not a Stanford or Duke or MIT or Harvard or for that matter, even a Howard or a Spellman, that it almost flies off the radar instantly. Is that something that an organization can can remedy? Can you make middle managers or can you make grant application reviewers not or be more well aware of HBCUs or non bias against smaller institutions? Is that even possible? Yeah, I mean, that's that's one of the things we're hoping. We're hoping so, right? It's one of the recommendations we made. So that is one thing that came up in the in the research is that USAID often privileges certain schools that have a name have name recognition. So one of the recommendations we put forth is to sort of increase the education around HBCUs. There's more than just five, right? And they're all they're all all these different HBCUs do all these different things. So we recommend quarterly brown bags and information sessions to let people know what each HBCU does, what their expertise is as well. And in addition to their annual conferences that we hope HBCU leadership will attend. I know many of your listeners may be in administration, but those are really great opportunities to meet not just USAID leadership, but leadership all across the government and sort of let it be known what your institution is known for and what success is. You know, you should you should think in addition. Yeah, I just did you have anything, Parlene, on that? I think that yeah. And I think also having having more networking would actually help them in educating them on what do USAID, what does HBCUs do? A lot of times they are associated with Africa or the Caribbean. And one of I mean, that's where a lot of people just think that, oh, I'm going to tap into HBCUs so we can talk about we can work in Africa. Or we could just work in the Caribbean. And we actually from our own research, we had a strong knowledge of learning that a lot of HBCUs are doing work in Asia. A lot of HBCUs are doing work in Eastern European countries. So they're doing work all over the world and they shouldn't be pigeonholed. And so one thing that we try to do in the report is we start spotlighting HBCUs so that they will know what kind of work that they are doing. So they can see that there's value in the work that they're doing. And the one thing is that we we actually interviewed one PWI, which was Michigan State. And the one thing that they said was that they had a subprime contract with some with an HBCU. And they said, you know, the one thing they could do is they said that the work was impeccable, that, you know, HBCUs have a knowledge base that is unmatched and that they every time they've partnered with an HBCU that they've gotten a huge that they've gotten they've been able to tap into resources that they didn't even imagine and do work that they couldn't even do without their support. The only issue they had with some of these schools was actually the administrative functions, how to build the contracts and things that they didn't have. And that's only because the schools didn't have the capacity. So that was one of the things that pigeonholed is not the knowledge is not the expertise HBCUs have all of that. And it's really about capacity building at these institutions so that they can be able to present that to places like USA. And it literally can come down to, as you mentioned, one or two people. You know, if you know a lot about HBCUs, five, I would say an institution researcher could almost be generous. There are some major institutions that have two or three. If somebody goes out on maternity leave, if somebody retires, if somebody gets ill, that derails a large section of the portfolio of research grants being made or how to oversee grants that have been received. Is that correct? In addition to institutional knowledge, that institutional knowledge often doesn't carry on when there's turnover in those positions. So that's a huge thing because, like I said, understanding how USA works and how each of their programs work, it can be an entire job in itself. And that's in addition to any funding that this institution may want to receive from HHS State Department education. I mean, these are all kind of targeted types of funding that you have to have specific knowledge to obtain and when you lose one person, one person goes on leave. I mean, you know, just like simply the knowledge to catch up to apply for these grants is just it is just a behemoth sort of undertaking. We know that resources at the at the center of this is resources that requires USA to be a little bit better and knowledgeable about HBCUs. HBCUs got to have a little more infrastructure in place. What is one thing that the black colleges could do and their executives could do that may not cost a lot of money, but it would make a substantial change now in their ability to attract or create partnerships with USA and other federal agencies for that matter. Well, our number one recommendation would probably be to engage the CBC. That was actually from a couple of people we talked to at USA. And engaging the CBC is really what pushes USA to engage HBCUs, to be honest. And the funding, additional funding and allocations of funding is really pushed by the the CBC. And so if HBCUs got together and they went to the CBC and said, hey, you know, we really want to work with USA and look at this funding and we want to have more funding, they really could get the CBC to push the agency to engage them more. And every single part, I think we talked about two or three different people who were in a higher administration at USA who really recommended that. Yeah, and I would also add more specific than that is to engage members of the CBC who directly work with the Senate and House Foreign Relations Committees because that is the purse for USA specifically for the foreign assistance budget that USAID receives. And so engaging those persons and getting them to sort of get the ball rolling within these foreign relations committees to say like you can even, you know, the argument could even be made for earmarks. But just generally around things such as lack of match for funds and making that a requirement, thinking about a broader array of funding opportunities. As of right now, USAID cannot fund for domestic institutions. They cannot fund any sort of institutional capacity building. That's a congressional mandate. If advocacy starts to happen proactively, perhaps something could change. Perhaps there could be some flexibility there. But that is something that is no cost. It really is labor intensive and just sort of the benefits of that could go beyond and could sort of impact positively all HBCUs for years. And just a quick note in the final thing and you ladies have been extraordinary. Thank you so much. But is there an amount that HBCUs or total grants made over a certain year over a certain period just to get folks a sense of the scope of the kind of funding and assistance that's available that HBCUs may be missing a part of? Is there a number that you would say, you know, here's why you got to get involved and here's why it's so important to have that legislative interface? Well, in the past, I would say since 2014, USAID has only awarded about seven point eight million to two HBCUs. And the bulk of their funding has gone to PWIs. And so there's a funding out there for them. And the fact that they've only are getting these fractions of this money for the last eight years says a lot. And there's money out there that they can tap in with education. When we actually did our survey, every single area of interest that HBCUs have is an area of funding that they can tap into with USAID. And so there's money there. It's just that HBCUs have to apply for it. And that was one of the things that one of the recommendations that we received from USAID or one of the things they mentioned was that there's not enough HBCU applications over all. But when you look on the other side of that coin, when we would talk to faculty at the faculty level, they said they're just overwhelmed. And sometimes some faculty members were getting grant. We're getting grant announcements two or three days before they were due. And that's not enough time to put together a full USAID application. And they're just overwhelmed. There's no one to screen it for them, no one to help them. So they're doing it all on their own. And I just want to add that that seven to eight percent over the over the course of six years, 2014 and 2020, annually, that accounts for fewer than 10 percent of the funds that go to all higher education institutions that USAID awards to each year. And so while HBCUs get the bulk of the funds for minority serving institutions, and that includes Hispanic institutions and appeasies, they get a very small percentage of all overall that can go to higher education institutions overall. So there's a lot of there's a lot of opportunity.