Two new grant programs from Engaged Cornell are designed to enhance partnerships by providing more opportunities for students to conduct community-engaged research and scholarship in New York state and beyond.

Engaged Graduate Student Grants will help address financial barriers to public engagement faced by some Cornell doctoral students, while the Engaged Cornell Cooperative Extension Student Programs (ECCE) grants are designed to support student teams collaborating with communities to address critical local needs identified by county and borough extension associations.

Open to Ph.D. students in any field, the graduate student grants will support work relevant to a student’s doctoral dissertation, including training and learning experiences. The application deadline is Jan. 27, 2016, and awards will be announced by early March.

Vice Provost Judith Appleton, Engaged Cornell’s director, said that eligibility and proposal requirements for the grant applications are framed to encourage applications from all fields of study.

“So many of our doctoral students are seeking opportunities to have a positive impact, in and beyond their disciplines, and in the world around them,” said Barbara A. Knuth, senior vice provost and dean of the Graduate School. “These grants provide critical support for doctoral students to work with and for communities to address local and regional challenges, identify and contribute to solutions, learn valuable research and collaboration skills, and develop an ethic of service and engagement that will carry through to their careers.”

Grant funding for ECCE programs is intended to advance partnerships between cooperative extension associations and Cornell faculty and students, in order to seek solutions to current challenges facing local communities.

“The ability to bring the collective talents and skills of many more Cornell students out to our communities through the Engaged Cornell program is an exciting new opportunity,” said Kevin Jordan, executive director of Cornell Cooperative Extension of Jefferson County. “We’ve all seen the positive impact that just one intern can have at the local level. Deploying groups of interns on a single project under this new initiative will increase that impact exponentially.”

The application process has two steps. First, extension associations submit proposals that identify a county (or multi-county) need that can be addressed by a team of Cornell students, with faculty oversight. Once a proposal is selected, Engaged Cornell and Cornell Cooperative Extension will invite faculty proposals for partnering with the extension association and relevant community organizations.

Any Cornell student – undergraduate, graduate or professional – is eligible to join teams funded by the ECCE grants. Appleton said that by opening eligibility to all students, there’s an increased opportunity to develop creative approaches to projects and stimulate learning across disciplines. Similarly, faculty from schools not traditionally connected with CCE will be able to forge new relationships across the state.

Like other Engaged Cornell funding opportunities, the two newly launched grants require that proposals demonstrate collaborative and reciprocally beneficial relationships among communities, students and faculty.

Engaged Cornell’s Undergraduate Engaged Research Programs, Engaged Scholar Prize and a new round of Engaged Curriculum Grants were announced in early November.