New Scholarship Fund — Message from Thomas A. Bryer, Program Director, Downtown Community-Engaged Scholarship
For the past few months, I have been communicating with the Central Florida Foundation to plan how we can potentially leverage a part of their new initiative (see below) to support our students and some of our downtown work, and how they can leverage our resources and expertise to support their mission. With assistance from Curtis Proctor, we are close to an agreement to fund 5 Master's or Ph.D. students for $10,000 per year, running January 2021-December 2021. CFF hopes this will be more than a one-off, but it depends on their funder, the Mott Foundation.
A few months ago, CFF launched an effort to align its investment portfolio with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This effort, coincidentally, aligned in timing and intent with the effort I led in Ross Wolf's office to document and align downtown scholarship activity with the SDGs. After discussions with CFF about the parallel tracks and interests, we saw an opportunity to collaborate. See their website devoted to this alignment: https://cffound.org/thrive/
Part of their initiative was to launch a fellowship program open for students at UCF, Rollins College, and elsewhere, at $10,000/year to conduct research in support of their five focus areas: economic stability, health, education, livability, and social connection & context.
After further discussion, we agreed that UCF, CCIE, and UCF Downtown programs have the student body and faculty expertise to support these efforts without looking at other CFL higher ed institutions, and we can potentially use the fellowship funds to make GRAs whole at 20 hours/week, thus potentially reducing the financial burden on the PAF program and other doctoral programs in CCIE, Nicholson, or potentially elsewhere, and/or free resources to support other students. To do that requires that the funds be in-house at UCF. Of course, other students who are not otherwise in a GRA position would also be eligible. It's my personal hope that some of our Ph.D. students who need funding but where there are gaps in resources can apply for this scholarship opportunity--including international students who need support in summer. In the case of supporting a GRA position, the funds (paid/renewed in installments throughout the 12-month period) can go towards the GRA stipend for the 10- or 20-hour/week assistantship. Otherwise, this would be a regular scholarship paid to the student account.
Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions, or if you have any concerns. Once an agreement is made for the donation to a new scholarship fund, we will have to move quickly to establish the process of application in order for students to begin the fellowship and receive the scholarship beginning next semester. We will also need to have one or more faculty members in each of the focus areas as potential supervisors of the students. Using the information collected in the UCF Downtown Community Engaged Scholarship survey this past summer, we can identify those faculty members who are working within the relevant SDG areas, so that their research agenda can benefit while working with the students in support of CFF's mission to achieve impact in these areas.
It is my hope and that of CFF that this will be an annual scholarship fund of $50,000/year for at least a few years.
