Research Support
The Institute for Social Transformation (IST) can support UCSC faculty members’ research projects to deepen their community and stakeholder engagement and improve research outcomes focused on resilient system solutions for equitable societies, resilient democracies, and environmental justice. If involved in the project planning, the institute can support any phase of a faculty’s project, emphasizing events, university administration, research with community partners, initiative development, and strategic leadership support.
Reach out early in the proposal development process to Ned LeBlond, Managing Director of IST (nleblond@ucsc.edu), to discuss research support and explore options to integrate any of the following core institute competencies:
Event, meeting, or conference hosting
- Community engagement – events to engage communities (or prepare researchers to work with communities)
- Cross sector and/or interdisciplinary conversations with an emphasis on public facing events.
Project administration
- Complex award management (multi-PI, cross division, subawards, international collaborations)
- Partner and vendor payments
Research with community or stakeholder engagement
- Partner outreach and engagement communications
- Research design
- Data collection and analysis
- Published public reports, video series or tool (different from academic writing)
- Intervention and implementation workshops
- Collecting and communicating community successes
- Building and maintaining partnerships with community organizations
Workshop and trainings with community partners/external stakeholders
- Conduct trainings with community partners and/or relevant stakeholders to translate research findings into integrated solutions
- Capacity building with community members and organizations to empower people to make change
- Linking academic research to community organizing and/or advocacy campaign strategies
- Coordinating speakers’ series, keynotes, webinars and/or events that uplift the work of faculty alongside community partners, students and those otherwise engaged on the ground
Initiative development
- Funding planning and coordination – identify and secure complementary funding
- Grant development in partnership with divisional and campus research development. IST will focus on integrating human centered design throughout the project lifecycle. We will discuss how the goals and objectives of the stated project align with our staff’s varied expertise and how to work that expertise into your project’s technical and administrative documents.
- Internal and external facing communications, including website development
Program management
- Partner and community scope of work development
- Employee supervision
- Financial planning and scenario development
Strategic leadership
- Co-PI organizational planning and project leadership
- Resource sharing, including long term flexible integration with institute experts
- Hiring staff and academic positions: opportunity listing, outreach, and committee coordination
- Fundraising and development messaging
- Interdisciplinary communication and collaboration
Our initial goal is to speed up and improve the quality of your project/initiative development. The institute will work with the PI and their partners on specific project support that may utilize staff time. We generally plan for 5-25% of individual staff time for project administration and 20-50% for more community-engaged activities. Through this collaborative process, we will determine value-aligned and trusted faculty who adhere to the institute’s community standards. These projects may receive ongoing and sustained program management and strategic leadership support from the institute and they can fund over 50% of relevant institute staff over a year.
Faculty who plan to submit a research proposal should contact Ashlee Tews, Director of Research Development for Social Sciences, as soon as possible (ashleeac@ucsc.edu).
For support with development and fundraising, click here or contact Joop Rubens, Managing Director of Development for Social Sciences (jrubens@ucsc.edu).
Rooted in the Social Sciences Division at UC Santa Cruz, the Institute for Social Transformation supports innovative scholarship that changes the world. The institute is a critical intellectual and social hub, connecting scholars across UC Santa Cruz and partners beyond the University, developing research-based solutions to urgent problems in the world. For more information about the institute and our work, explore:
