It's a Cary! It's a Lou! It's a Ulysses!

No, it's…

…a compilation of external community engagement funding sources!

You guessed it!

Everyone's a winner!

Continuing our month of diving deep on the four Carnegie application money questions, this week we are looking at the external funding sources question, aka:

1st Timers: Is external funding dedicated to supporting institutional engagement with community?

Reclassifyers: Describe what has changed, if anything, with the external budgetary allocations since the last classification.

What's Really Being Asked Here?

Aside from the institution's internal budget, how else are the community engagement activities funded?

This question is part two of a pair with the Internal Budgetary Allocations question. Together, these two answers will provide a complete picture about how the "coordinating infrastructure" is funded. The "coordinating infrastructure" is often a center or office that has direct oversight of some aspects of the institution's CE work and is in cooperative dialogue with the other types of CE work that are overseen by different offices/administrators.

What if you don't have a "coordinating infrastructure?"

Then this is where you'll want to collect and aggregate all of the external funding that supports the institution's community engagement activities, including programs and scholarship.

It is rare for all CE funding across an entire institution to be channeled through one center, even when there is a "coordinating infrastructure." So, some campuses include this information about other sources of CE funding alongside the details about their center's external funding, to round out the larger picture external funding.

Carnegie's Criteria for Addressing This Question

Little guidance was provided in the Carnegie Document Framework on this question. This suggests that the stakes for the reviewers are far higher when it comes to Internal Budgetary Allocation than external funding support.

They do advise including:

• public and private grants

• private gifts

• alumnae or institutional development funds

• donor support

• federal/state/local government funds

• corporate funds

Omit

No advice about what to omit were provided.

Motivation Behind This Question

A blend of multiple revenue sources makes your coordinating infrastructure hardier. If you have that, speak to how it secures sustainability.

But there is no wrong answer to this question, so don't spend too much time on it.

Data Collection Tip

If you have an office of grants management, they might be able to help your search by providing a comprehensive list of the grants received each year. Given that grants are competitive, they'll want to protect the authors' proprietary information. But with access to the front page of the proposal, it should be possible to discern the nature of the grant and whether it contains a significant community engagement component.

Connections to Other Application Questions

By working with a grants management office, you may able to be able to identify grants that have what the National Science Foundation refers to as a "Broader Impact." This can help in completion of the Broader Impacts Research question on the Carnegie application.

You may also identify grants connected to community engagement partnerships that you can consider for inclusion in the Partnership Grid.

You've now survived half of the money questions! Congratulations!

Next week: Fundraising.