1.0 Premise of Broader Impacts Design (BID) project
The premise of the Broader Impacts Design (BID) project is that by establishing a partnership that is durable – that is to say, one that is built to last beyond any individual collaborative project or person in a specific leadership position – universities and informal science education organizations (ISEs) can increase their capacity to focus on the quality of the Broader Impacts (BI) projects and can better align subsequent collaborative efforts with their own institutional priorities.
The goal is to establish durable, institutionalized partnerships that enable both organizations to more effectively support Principal Investigators in their Broader Impacts work.
The challenges associated with the traditional “ad hoc” approach are well documented. When collaborations are established at the level of the individual researcher, or Principal Investigator (PI), they often reach out to any informal learning expert whose contact info they can find – and often too late for effective planning. Particularly when planning is rushed, it can be difficult to make sure the resource needs and priorities of each partner are adequately addressed. Even when these efforts lead to funding, shared efforts often have an expiration date when the PI’s funding ends or their interest/position leads them elsewhere. The cycle repeats each time a new PI seeks ISE support for their own Broader Impacts work.
We hope that bringing organizations together at an institutional level can help reduce these redundancies and pave the way for higher impact collaborations.
2.0 The Results
What follows is an account of our experiences over the course of four years. This collection of resources is the product of many individuals, and depicts a work in progress. The project consisted of three core partnerships in New York, Washington, and Wisconsin. The experiences of these partners are outlined in detail here (below) and as timelines. Six additional partnerships (in California, Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Vermont/New Hampshire) joined the project as a second cohort; the experiences of these groups is described through short vignettes on the “Partnership Stories” page.
3.0 Project Partners
The BID project was supported by a collection of collaborative research grants funded by the National Foundation and awarded to the Institute for Learning Innovation, Oregon State University, Pacific Science Center, The University of Washington – Bothell, The University of Wisconsin – Madison, The Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, Sciencenter in Ithaca, and Cornell University.
The three core partnerships in Washington, Wisconsin, and New York were joined by a second cohort of six additional partnerships: The University of Minnesota and the Minnesota Zoo; University of Colorado and CU Science Discovery; the University of California, San Diego and Fleet Science Center; the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Museum of Life & Science, and Duke University; the Dartmouth Guarini School of Graduate & Advanced Studies and Vermont Institute of Natural Science; and the University of New Mexico and Explora.