The Grants Office supports the College's academic program by helping faculty obtain outside support for their scholarship and teaching, and by helping coordinate campus-wide initiatives in support of pedagogy, curriculum development, teaching facilities, and occasionally co-curricular activities. We are located in the same suite of offices as Academic Affairs and work closely with the Deans in advancing Grinnell’s educational mission.
Services
If you are seeking external support for your scholarship, we urge you to contact us early in your planning. Often we can help focus your thinking by alerting you to particular funding opportunities. We are eager to meet with new and junior faculty to help them identify their needs as they build their careers toward tenure. We also like to speak with all faculty who are planning sabbatical or other leaves available through the Dean’s office. In most cases, you must apply for supplemental support for leaves more than a year in advance, so the sooner we can begin working with you the better.
The first steps in writing a grant proposal are to:
· Identify what you intend to do;
· decide how you intend to go about it; and
· assess what resources (including time) you need to accomplish the work you plan to pursue.
When you’ve completed these steps, we can help you identify possible outside sources of funding, whether for leaves, summer fellowships for research and writing, the purchase of major research equipment, or other support. Then we can take your draft proposal idea or need and help you reshape it into the sometimes idiosyncratic forms that foundations and government agencies prefer. We will also:
· Proofread the final proposal;
· check it against the review criteria;
· make sure your description is comprehensible to the knowledgeable non-specialist reader (a requirement of many review panels); and
· help with preparing and submitting paper or online forms.
Feel free to contact us for whatever you might need, from the initial exploration of how to support your idea, to the final editing of your proposal. Just email or telephone us and make an appointment.