Overcoming the Challenges of Obtaining Funding by Working Together

Breakout Session 2A: How do we find funding for our partnership programs that will support innovative partnership initiatives? This session will illustrate the approach of tapping into courses that are already offered by university partners and adapting those courses to be partnership-focused. We have found this approach to be highly successful for building capacity for grant writing within partnerships. Universities increasingly offer grant writing courses, yet these courses are often focused on teaching individual students the skills to write successful grants to support their own work. This session will show how such courses can be adapted to emphasize partnership approaches, to develop grant writing resources for partners, and to culminate in free grant writing workshops for the community. Such an approach strengthens the skill development of the students while at the same time disseminating the training widely throughout the community. The advantage of this approach is that it requires few additional resources while having the potential to build partnership capacity for successfully seeking funding and building programs that are sufficiently rigorous to meet the demands of funders. Examples from courses at UMass Lowell and UMaine will illustrate how this approach has been effectively implemented in many different contexts.