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About the Seeding Excellence Initiative (SEI)

SEI, a two-year initiative, aims to sustain the continued growth of the campus research enterprise by providing competitive pilot funding in four strategic areas. The OVPR Community Engaged Scholars program (AHSS), one of SEI’s four strategic areas, will invest in the success of the University’s efforts to partner with Iowa’s communities for sustained research and scholarship collaborations. SEI is made possible through funding to RDO from the public-private partnership(P3) Year 1 funding cycle.

The Research Development Office (RDO) and the Obermann Center within the University of Iowa Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) seek proposals for one-year OVPR Community Engaged Scholars (Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences [AHSS]) proposals. The goal is for university/community teams to find productive approaches to solving problems the faculty and partner both deem significant. In FY23, it is anticipated that there will be up to 8 OVPR Community Engaged Scholars (AHSS) awards through the Seeding Excellence Initiative (SEI).

We invite pairs of UI faculty and community partners to apply for grants of up to $5,000. This funding will support projects in which a UI faculty member and a community partner collaborate on a publicly engaged, research-based project in the arts, humanities, or social sciences. The goal is for these teams to find productive approaches to solving problems the faculty and partner both deem significant. Our hope is that these teams will address research questions of value to the faculty member’s discipline(s) while also offering concrete benefit to the public partner’s community. The partners may propose a project that launches a new collaboration or enhances an existing collaboration. In either case, the work should be completed within a year of receiving the grant award.

This is an opportunity for artists, scholars, and researchers to team up with community partners to experiment with co-designed projects on a more contained local scale. The grant offers partners a means to address a specific research question focused on a need or opportunity in Iowa. In so doing, the partners can explore what methods or approaches best support publicly engaged arts and scholarship projects that are collaboratively designed, deeply reciprocal, and attentive to the ongoing process of collaboration as well as to impact and outcomes. Very specifically, we seek proposals in which the two or more collaborators have talked frankly about the ways they will balance the needs of the two partners and formed a plan for meeting those needs. Artists and scholars who work in higher education are rewarded for creating and sharing new knowledge that impacts their disciplines. Community partners need outcomes that concretely benefit the communities they serve. Projects that connect those two objectives, landing on research questions and proposed outcomes that advance the goals of each partner, will hit that sweet spot.

The deadline for the Seeding Excellence: OVPR Community Engaged Scholars grant is Oct. 26, 2022.

Learn more at https://obermann.uiowa.edu/seeding-excellence-ovpr-community-engaged-scholars-arts-humanities-and-social-sciences.

If you're interested in applying, please attend this mini-design workshop at the Obermann Center for Advanced studies on Sept. 16 from 1 to 3 p.m.