 Welcome to the screencast edition of the 2016 Grant and Public Scholarship Workshop. My name's Amanda Healy, and I'm the graduate student fellow working with the Program and Public Scholarship, as well as the past grantee. Today, I'll be giving you a step-by-step breakdown of the grant application process, including some insider tips on how to make sure you submit the strongest proposal possible. Before we dig into the nitty-gritty of the grant process itself, I'm going to take a step back and talk a bit about the work of our program more broadly. Our mission is to support collaborative, scholarly, and creative endeavors that engage communities, co-create public good, and enhance students' professional development. The grants I'll be discussing today are one of four major programs. The Institute for Social Change is a week-long introduction to public scholarship that takes place each year in August. At the Institute, students meet with publicly-engaged scholars and connect with other students involved in this work. The Mellon Public Humanities Fellowships help graduate students build scholarly capacities through experience and non-faculty jobs, allowing students to explore diverse career paths and expand their professional networks. The Engaged Pedagogy Initiative is a semester-long training on community-based learning, producing collaboration with the Center for Engaged Academic Learning. Finally, the Grants in Public Scholarship, which we'll discuss today, are awarded on an annual basis. They offer students the opportunity to receive up to 8,000 dollars in funding to collaborate on scholarly projects that benefit the community. Complete applications for the Grants in Public Scholarship include six components, contact information, a project summary, a partnership agreement, a participant CV, and a community partner CV or resume, a budget and budget narrative, and a letter or letters of commitment. Since I think contact info is self-explanatory, I'm going to start with the project summary. The project summary should begin with a one-paragraph abstract of the project. Please limit your entire summary to a maximum of four pages, including your abstract double-spaced. I'm going to say that one more time. Please limit your entire summary, including the abstract, to a max of four double-spaced pages. It's really important to follow directions, and this is a great way to demonstrate that you can do that under respect to the time of the grant review committee. The project summary should include five sections, scholarship, social impact, collaboration, feasibility, and sustainability. First, scholarship. How will this project advance the students' scholarly goals and interests? We want to urge you to think broadly and creatively about what this means. You don't necessarily have to draw a connection between your dissertation topic and the project, but you want to connect it to your own advancement and development. So is this the next step for you as a scholar, the next area of your research? Is this going to help you develop as a, in a pedagogical capacity? Social impact. How will this project address community-identified needs? It's so important to remember that you're, this is a mutually beneficial project. So what need will this serve to the community? Collaboration. How will this project draw on the strengths of participants to achieve mutually beneficial goals? It cannot stress this enough. Make it clear how this project benefits and advances you and your own scholarship, and how it speaks to a community identified need at the same time. Feasibility. What are the applicant's qualifications related to community-based research or teaching? What are the skills of the project's partners that make this a feasible project? Any evidence you have, including drawing on your own CV or resume, to demonstrate that you are capable of executing the project you're proposing. Finally, sustainability. How will the project partners collaborate to ensure that the project's outcomes have a sustained impact in the local community and beyond? If you are producing a white paper, how is that going to circulate and have a lasting impact? If you are running an after-school program for students, how is that going to have a life after that initial project ends? Before we get into the details of the partner agreement, I want to take a minute to clarify what we mean by a community partner. On the right, you can see a graphic representation of this so-far framework just designed for differentiating relationships and community-based projects. Please note that there's a differentiation of community into organizations and residents. This distinction acknowledges that persons in these two groups often have different cultures, goals, resources, roles, and power. Given that the grant is providing resources to stakeholders for accountability as funders, our grant requires that a partner have some kind of organizational affiliation. For example, you might be working with a community resident who's part of an organization of artist. We would look for an agreement with that organization with the community resident as the primary contact. You might be working with several parents within a school system. We would look for an agreement with a parent or school organization with those parents in the community as members of that organizational structure. It's also worth noting that organizations do not have to have an official legal status, for example, as a 501c3 non-profit, but they should be publicly identifiable as an organization. Partnership agreements include a total of eight sections. First, an objective. Describe the collaboration's mission or purpose. Outcomes. What do the project partners hope to achieve through this collaboration? Implementation. How will the project partners work together to achieve the goals of the collaboration? This is a really important one and one that I found really valuable in my own work. Going step by step through this was a great way to clarify roles and responsibilities with my community partner. Project timeline. Describe the faces of the project and each partner's responsibilities during each phase. Again, same goes for that. Each element of this partnership agreement is a wonderful time to have a conversation with your community partner and make sure you're on the same page about everything. The next component is monitoring and evaluation. How will the project partners assess the project outcomes and impact? We encourage you to think really broadly and creatively about evaluation and we recognize that different kinds of projects require different kinds of evaluations. If you are new to this or you have questions about how to develop a system of monitoring and evaluation, we recommend reaching out to the U of M Curtis Center in the School of Social Work. They offer one-on-one consultations for faculty, staff, and students interested in developing program assessment. Communication. How will you ensure that the project partners remain fully apprised of all developments over the course of the project? Think about it. Email might be second nature to you but is that true for your community partner or do they prefer conversations on the phone? That's a really important detail to get nailed down at the outset. Accountability. How will the partners track the progress of the project and hold each other accountable for its development? This is a great way to negotiate an agreement of what you will do if something goes off track so that you have a recourse and you have a plan in action if something happens. Budget. It's very important that you provide a detailed inclusive budget. This means listing any and all sources of funding including in-kind donations or other funders. It also means including a list and designation of funders or funding sources for other parts of the project even if it's not a section that you're seeking money for. Unallowable expenses include student stipends which can be requested at up to $18 per hour, community partner honorariums for organizational costs, and transportation, research materials, supplies, documentation, publication, production of public goods such as performances or exhibitions. In terms of unallowable expenses the first main one is equipment purchases for example a computer. Exceptions have been made in the past but please articulate the critical need for any equipment for the project success if you're going to request an exception. The next unallowable expense would be the cost of a GSRA ship or a GSI ship to do work for a professor and during the academic year you cannot request student stipend for work related to your dissertation if you already have a full stipend support. In this summer funding is a bit more complicated but please clarify your summer funding sources if you're asking for student stipend over that time period around making sure that again you're not being double paid for work related to your dissertation. The main point here is that we own these are competitive grants and we only have so much funding so we want to make sure that we're not giving a student extra money to complete work that they were already funded to complete. At this summer's Institute for Social Change a grant expert at the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation offered our students some budget advice. The first is to propose a reasonable budget size for work so don't feel like you need to ask for all of the money if that doesn't suit the scale of your project. Be sure to double check allowable expenses so that you're not requesting grant funding for something that's not permitted. Make sure to include in-kind donations and other sources of funding which can strengthen your case especially when it indicates community buy-in so if your organization that you're working with is willing to donate space or a copy machine and paper that speaks well of your grant project and the collaboration at stake. Finally double check your numbers it's quite common to revise your budget over the course of developing your proposal but make sure that when you hand in the final version all the numbers actually add up to the amount of money that you're proposing. Letters of commitment. Letter or letters from the community partner should restate major elements of the partner agreement. What role will the community partners play in the project? How will the project advance partners organizational mission? And what are the expected project outcomes from the perspective of the partner? Again this is a really important element for ensuring that you and your partner are on the same page and are both making an equal commitment. In terms of the criteria by which your application will be evaluated there are three major criteria. Do the project outcomes build on the student's scholarly interests and translate this scholarly work to a public audience? Again articulating this is really crucial it's not enough to have a project that is good for your community partner it has to advance your own development. Does the project demonstrate mutually beneficial and collaborative practices with a community partner? Good collaborative practice includes outlining clear lines of communication and articulating mutual benefit to all parties to the collaboration. Finally will the project result in the creation of a new public cultural good product or service? To help you make sure that you're being clear about the public good your project will result in we've drawn up these criteria which have been adapted from Imagining America's recommended criteria for evaluating public scholarship and tenure and promotion files. It's important to note the individual projects are not expected to meet each of these criteria rather these attempt to delineate the range of possible forms public scholarship can take. Public good will be evaluated by our grant committee according to a plan for sustainability beyond the life of the grant, a plan for engaging the widest possible public, reflection on potential contributions to public or community policy or influence upon professional practice, models that enrich the artistic and cultural life of the community, and a clear evaluation plan with commitments from partners and or peers to assess the significance of the public good generated by the project. Again your project may not fit all of these criteria and that's fine. Pay attention to the ones that do sync with your project. Finally next steps the proposal deadline is on January 17th, 2017. Submit your application online at the grant portal site linked on the screen. Know that your selection committee is composed of staff from the Rackham program in public scholarship, faculty and former grantees. Notifications will go out by mid-march of 2017. At that time grant agreements may require budget modifications. Finally if you have any additional questions please don't hesitate to contact me. I'm Amanda Healy at the email listed above. Thanks for joining us for this screencast edition of the Grants and Public Scholarship Workshop. Good luck!