Community Engagement Grants

The Community Engaged Learning and Research Initiative committee (CELRI) administers mini-grants for curricular activities that involve local community engagement. CELRI grants take two forms:

Partnership Grants

Partnership grants can be exploratory (to investigate project possibilities, to locate and plan with community partners, and to research community-engaged learning pedagogies), or they can facilitate an already-designed project. They can also be projects dedicated to reframing faculty members’ scholarly work to make it more community engaged (which may mean part of the work is identifying potential local community partners).

Preference will be given to projects that lend themselves to meaningful and sustained community partner involvement at both the planning and implementation phases and that hold the potential for building long-term partnerships.

Duration: Longer term (several weeks – a semester)

Funding: The maximum budget request for a Partnership Grant is $3,000.

CELRI grants are not intended to support faculty stipends. If a faculty stipend is necessary to achieve equity in a community engaged project, you are encouraged to apply to a Pedagogical Inquiry Grant (PIG) funded through the Center for Teaching and Learning.

Collaboration Grants

Collaboration grants are intended to support costs associated with short-term community engaged course components. Examples of community partner roles in short-term engagements include: guest speaker, panel participant, local trip liaison, etc. Associated costs may include: community partner stipends, travel expenses, workshop materials, etc.

Duration: Short-term

Funding: The maximum request for a Collaboration Grant is $1,500.

Faculty interested in collaborative community engagement projects across the Northwest Five Consortium (NW5C) should contact Sarah Hurlburt about funding opportunities.

Applications for Spring 2024 grants are due by December 1, 2023. Please submit to celri@whitman.edu.

Required documents

1. Application cover page (Partnership Grant and Collaboration Grant)
2. Project description
3. Budget
4. Report (submitted after completion, required for any stipend payment)

CELRI Committee, 2023-24

Scott Elliott
Sarah Hurlburt
Abby Juhasz
Camilo Lund-Montano, Chair
Mary Raschko, ex officio