In communication, the true impact of our work is often less concrete than we would like. The tangible metrics, be it clicks, shares, likes, or impressions, often cannot tell us with certainty how much our stories, videos, or social media posts actually contributed to the organization's mission.
In 2017, though, I had the pleasure of playing a key role in a project whose impact is very tangible. I was part of the team that worked on a proposal that the Duke Graduate School was submitting to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for a $1 million grant to support efforts to increase the number of PhD holders from races/ethnicities that are underrepresented in the physical sciences and engineering. The initiative would not only focus on recruiting more such students into Duke's PhD programs, but also on ensuring that they have the support they need to succeed once they are at Duke.
I took the lead in writing and editing the proposal. Before typing a single word, I first worked closely with the rest of the project team -- which included stakeholders from multiple offices within The Graduate School and from other parts of Duke -- to formulate a coherent, exciting vision for how we would tackle the challenge of increasing the number of underrepresented PhD researchers.
Once the vision had taken shape, I began putting together the proposal, writing a significant chunk of it and incorporating information and language from a variety of other sources. The final proposal was 20 pages that succinctly laid out the challenge, the potential areas for improvement, and the framework of the efforts we would undertake to meet the challenge (a framework that I helped build). The proposal also contained about 100 pages of indices, containing supplemental material that detailed various aspects of our proposed efforts.
Our proposal was accepted by the Sloan Foundation, and the $1 million grant is now being used to support 10 new PhD students each year. The first cohort of these students arrived on campus in the summer of 2018, and I am part of the committee that oversees the day-to-day efforts to support them. In this case, every interaction with these students and every milestone in their graduate school career serve as reminders of the impact of our work, and my contribution to that endeavor (and it's nice to be able to say your work directly helped bring in $1 million for the organization). In the years since, the Duke UCEM successfully renewed the grant twice (the maximum renewals available), with me playing a similar role in the grant writing process. In all, I helped write and edit three successful grant proposals that brought in $3 million to fund the Duke UCEM for nearly a decade.
While the grant proposal is not publicly available, you can learn more about the work it's funding at the website for the Duke Center of Exemplary Mentoring, a new initiative created with the grant to support the students we recruit through this initiative.