CAA Academic Alliance Announces Fourth Round Of Innovate/Collaborate Grant Awards
Elle Peterson
Richmond, VA – The CAA Academic Alliance announces the recipients of its fourth round of funding awards for the Innovate/Collaborate (IN/CO) Grant Program. Since 2016, the CAA Academic Alliance has encouraged inter-institutional collaboration and research innovation through its signature IN/CO Grant Program, by providing seed and pilot initiative funding to project teams of two or more collaborating CAA institutions.
The Alliance is turning to true innovators – faculty, staff and students from CAA member institutions – to generate powerful ideas that creatively address pressing policy challenges in higher education. The Alliance supports and champions these ideas through the Innovate/Collaborate (IN/CO) Grant Program, providing grants for inter-institutional project teams comprised of CAA members that fuel collaboration between institutions, enhance institutional excellence, and promote innovation in intellectual inquiry. Mike Jackson, Vice Provost of Curriculum and Programs,
Northeastern University, states “The Innovate/Collaborate Grant Program provides the opportunity for partner institutions in the CAA to work collaboratively on important issues in higher education to best meet the changing needs of students.”
Awards are announced for the following project teams, with grant awards of $80,000 per project, over the two-year grant period:
“The Power of Peers: A Comprehensive, Scalable Template to Meet the Mental Wellness
Needs of Young Adults on University and College Campuses”
Project team: Stony Brook University with Hofstra University and The University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW)
According to Carl W. Lejuez, Executive Vice President and Provost, Stony Brook University, “With leading-edge student mental wellness resources and a top-ranked Clinical Psychology program, Stony Brook is eager to partner in this pilot effort to create structures that can be replicated across institutions. We are grateful to the CAA Academic Alliance for the opportunity and look forward to working closely with Hofstra University and UNCW to contribute toward this growing need for student support.” The project aims include confronting the growing need for mental health/wellness support for college students through a public mental health approach that includes universal and selective prevention, focusing on early intervention and social norming communications. Utilizing an evidenced-based template for a comprehensive approach to prevention and early intervention, with strong potential for full-scale implementation on multiple campuses, the project plan creates a unified collaboration between student affairs and academic affairs across the two-year pilot program period. Charles G. Riordan, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, Hofstra University, asserts “The pilot project facilitates collaborative exploration and an action plan to improve student mental health through enhanced prevention strategies and peer intervention training in a manner that can be scaled.”
“Visualizing Mental Health and Wellness in a Time of Cascading Disasters”
Project team: Drexel University with Northeastern University and Monmouth University
The project team plans to address multiple challenges facing higher education: how to make course content relevant to the 21st century, how to support diverse styles of learning, and how to support students as they grapple with mental health challenges during tumultuous times. The project will create multidisciplinary teams of visual artists and social scientists to produce a new pedagogy—one that teaches students how to visually investigate and represent mental health and well-being while drawing on social scientific knowledge of illness and health disparities. Richard Veit, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, Monmouth University, offers “The IN/CO Grant Program provides an outstanding opportunity to support cutting edge scholarship, while also reinforcing the shared values of the CAA Academic Alliance.”
IN/CO grants fund actionable, scalable initiatives that are designed to contribute lessons or best practices for the higher education community; marketable for future academic publication or conference presentation; and attractive to future extramural funding beyond the IN/CO grant program. According to Elle Peterson, Executive Director of the
CAA Academic Alliance, “The Alliance is pleased to offer the IN/CO grantmaking opportunity to create meaningful impact for students, faculty, staff and the communities of all CAA Academic Alliance institutions.
About The CAA Academic Alliance
The CAA Academic Alliance is an academic consortium that facilitates collaboration and communication across its 14-member institutions, engaging faculty, staff, and students in meaningful initiatives that enrich the academic environment, while advancing student success, and driving innovation and best practices in higher education. The Alliance was founded in 2002 to academically link the member institutions of the CAA sports conference, and serves a diverse audience of faculty, staff, and students across its membership.
www.caa-academics.org