Where have you encountered, and how have you dealt with, power imbalances within the partnership? These may be related to money (e.g. to hire help, dedicate time, general resources, or from NSF), organizational size, privilege, and/or positionality (i.e., where one sits in an organization and the amount of authority and agency they feel they have as a result).

We are fortunate to work on a campus with over 20 different broader impacts providers. Our partnership is between our campus’s Research and Innovation Office, another large umbrella organization concerned with education and outreach, and one specific broader impacts provider. We were initially concerned that other BI providers would feel like we were doing something exclusive to them since we hadn’t included them in our application to the BID partnership. However, this concern that the BID partnership might cause tension among other groups in our large, complex “ecosystem” of on- and off-campus BI providers was not supported. When we came back from the initial planning meeting we sent all BI providers on our campus a report of what we had accomplished, making sure we were being completely transparent. In the end, the BID collaboration has enabled us to make a stronger case for the importance of BI work overall and has led to a deeper involvement of the three partner organizations as well as other BI providers on campus in endeavors like the “Commit to Submit” program for faculty preparing NSF CAREER proposals.

What indicators have you observed that the work is becoming institutionalized, through engagement of leadership, additional staff, succession planning, and new policies, procedures or routines that support sustained partnership? How have you navigated the balance between nurturing individual relationships with the desire to create systems/institutionalize? How has the team navigated the issues that arise from job changes and turnover?

The National BID project fueled our 3-way partnership by first catalyzing a meeting with all of our respective supervisors that confirmed their high-level support as demonstrated by agreeing to promote our events, routinely inform faculty about the existence of our resources, etc. Having the stamp of approval on our work from the Vice Chancellor of Research and the Director of the Office of Outreach and Education for our campus lent authenticity to our work so that Department Chairs and even Deans were more likely to promote connections with their faculty. We have had a lot of broad participation at our campus BI Expo–a resource fair where faculty hear from and get to talk to BI providers across campus–and now that we have an in-person and virtual model for the Expo it seems sustainable annually. Last, our website for BI resources on campus gets heavy traffic throughout the year.