The College of Communication and Information Sciences (C&IS) at The University of Alabama prides itself on championing creativity and intellectual curiosity. This semester, C&IS launched the Grant Writing Institute designed to position faculty for success in writing grant application proposals and securing grant funding.
The Grant Writing Institute is designed to provide participants with the tools necessary to complete an application for research funding and submit the application to a federal or state agency or a foundation within 12 months of the start of the program. Led by Dr. Kim Bissell and Dr. Anneliese Bolland, the program works through a partnership between the Institute for Communication Research (ICIR) and the departments within C&IS to provide a semester-long course release for each of the participants.
“With all the aspects grant writing includes, it’s common to spend at least 60 to 80 hours working on a grant proposal,” said Dr. Kim Bissell, Associate Dean for Research at C&IS. “The idea with the Grant Writing Institute is to buy out the time professors would take to teach a course and have them utilize that time to work on a grant instead.”
Over the course of the semester, participants meet for six scheduled sessions designed to lead them through the process of writing and submitting a grant application. The sessions cover topics such as how to justify budgets in grant proposals and how to prepare for a meeting with a program officer from a funding agency. Each session assigns specific tasks to be completed by the next session to assist the participants with staying on schedule.
As an added bonus, The University of Alabama Office of Proposal Development reserved one of its flights to Washington D.C. specifically for the C&IS grant writing fellows to discuss their grant proposals with program officers. According to Bissell, these meetings provided valuable feedback to grant writers and helped secure advocates for their grant when the time comes for the review panel to award funding.
In addition to teaching about the grant writing process, the program guides all participants through submitting their own grant. By the end of May 2019, each participant will have a finalized grant application in excess of $100,000 for review, with a submission deadline of December 2019.
“Grant writing is tedious. It’s time consuming, and it can be frustrating to make the numbers work. This experience and process will help our participants be more confident each time they apply,” said Bissell. “The goal of the Grant Writing Institute is to give faculty the tools and resources they will continue to use long after their time in the program.”
The 2019 C&IS Grant Writing Institute participants are:
UA’s College of Communication and Information Sciences’ faculty and students conduct cutting-edge research that creates knowledge and provides solutions to global issues across the full communication and information spectrum. To learn more about the College’s research initiatives, visit cis.ua.edu/research.
