Proposal for Grant Writing Partnership with Fargo Non-Profits

Back ground: Service learning, or experiential education, provides students with learning opportunities unavailable to them in the traditional classroom. Typically, students involved in service learning volunteer in their communities and reflect on those experiences in classroom assignments. However, such learning opportunities are particularly enriching when students write for, rather than about their volunteer work. Only after developing and teaching a course on grants research and writing, did I begin to learn about experiential education and realize how well suited the content of a grants class is to the pedagogical approach of service learning.

By combining the two, I propose a partnership between NDSU grant writing students and Fargo non-profit organizations. The advanced undergraduate and graduate students who take this class leave it with a clear notion of how to research and write grants. What these students lack is real world experience—experience that could be gained through internship work with a local non-profit agency. These agencies, mainly arts fundraisers, faith-based organizations, and human services providers, are keen to work with NDSU students in a partner relationship. Of the five of such agencies with which I made preliminary contact, all five suggested they would like to have (and in fact desperately needed) NDSU students working for them in this capacity and could offer the students experience researching and/or writing grants. Although grant writing is a new course offered by the English department, it filled the time we offered it and had a lengthy wait list. Because of this success, it will be offered yearly. Moreover, the course enrolled students from eight academic departments and four colleges. Therefore, the intern program I propose would include and serve students from across campus—students who would bring with them the wide variety of expertise to match the variety of needs of non-profits serving diverse populations in Fargo.

Objectives:

• Offer an invaluable service to understaffed Fargo non-profits by offering them 16-48 hours of grants research and/or writing.
• Provide NDSU students with an enriched learning opportunity by placing them in internships where they can practice the skills they have learned in the classroom in non-profit organization.

Plan: With funding, I can meet these objectives through the following steps:

• make contact with a wide variety of non-profits in Fargo, interviewing their personnel who would be working most closely with interns.
• choose 10-12 sites that seem most student-friendly and capable of offering students close guidance.
• hire a graduate assistant to help coordinate sites and act as a liaison between students and agencies.

Implementing this plan will require time during the summer for me to make the community contacts necessary to place students in internships where they will be both mentored and monitored. Establishing relationships with the agencies in which students will be placed is extremely important because the goal is not to have students doing free work for community agencies, but to develop ongoing partnership relations that serve the educational needs of students and offers student expertise to community agencies. Such a model of engagement serves both partners. A graduate student coordinator will help me maintain contact with the community agencies and assess student learning and agency satisfaction.

Budget: $3000.00 Three weeks summer salary

Benefits: Funding this project will offer the following benefits:

• encourage ongoing partnerships between NDSU and Fargo non-profit agencies, developing opportunities for a variety of kinds of exchanges beyond this program: student job placement, expanded service learning opportunities, and a deeper understanding of how NDSU can support and enhance the goals of community non-profit agencies.
• provide local non-profits with the opportunity to increase their grant seeking activities through increased personnel.
• offer students real world work, community connections, and mentoring—increasing opportunities for job placement in our community. (And we want to keep our students in the state!)
• create an administrative position for a qualified graduate student—offering the opportunity to develop important administrative, mentoring, and job skills.
• produce a strong base of support for what should become a continuing (and I hope) expanded program.