The Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Success (GPS) offers a one-time Community Building Mini Grant of up to $2,000 for those who focus on community-forward research. This yearlong mini-grant seeks to support Northwestern graduate students in facilitating, promoting, and advancing innovative ideas on social justice and belonging in Northwestern and larger communities.
$80,000
awarded since 2021
Applicants:
All TGS students, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate student/postdoctoral organizations whose work reflects the principles of advocacy, community building, and/or sustainability are eligible to apply for a Community Building Mini Grant.
Faculty members are not eligible to apply for these mini grants. However, if faculty members work with and advise graduate student/postdoctoral organizations, it will not affect eligibility.
Eligible and Ineligible Activities:
These mini grants are intended to provide support to members of the TGS community whose work or service advances, or challenges, the greater Northwestern community to foster values of community and belonging on campus and beyond.
Examples of eligible activities could include:
- Research projects
- Service opportunities
- Initiatives that foster community and belonging
- Climate surveys and programming within the Northwestern community
- Mentorship programs at Northwestern University and neighboring communities
- Hosting conferences and dialogues
Projects, research, and service opportunities are not limited to the examples provided. We are looking forward to the creative and collaborative ways these funds can be used.
Ineligible activities and allocations include:
- Conference travel and lodging
- Providing a salary
- Paying a debt
- Covering personal expenses
Terms of Acceptance:
All grantees are expected to submit a 5-7 recorded presentation on their work, describing the proposal and how it came into fruition within the past year. The presentation should include the following elements:
- Description of your project
- How the grant was utilized
- Findings and results of your project
- Overall experience with the process
- How your project facilitated, promoted, and/or advanced innovative ideas on community and belonging within the Northwestern community
Application Review Process
A committee of TGS staff will review the applications on the following categories:
- Commitment to Community and Belonging
- Leadership
- Service
- Projected Impact/Influence
- Clarity and Organization of Proposal
Application Timeline
All required materials and information must be submitted by Friday, May 31 to be considered for the 2024–25 Community Building Mini Grants. Awardees will be announced in Summer 2024.
Apply Now
Awardees for 2024–25
"As an ethnographer and theater-maker, I work with refugees, migrants, and asylum-seekers to tell the stories that they want to tell. We use theater for all sorts of reasons: to build community, to work through trauma, to create room for resistance, to spark friendship. Through this, I root my justice-oriented mission – to facilitate spaces of care, to meet participants where they are, and to ensure that the work is driven by the needs of the community. In partnership with EFL classes, immigration lawyers, and asylum-seekers, I will create workshops that help asylum-seekers prepare for their screenings if a lawyer cannot represent them."
"We plan to host two events: a science fair, where we introduce migrant youth in Chicago to the different sciences through presentations and hands-on activities; and a “shadow a scientist” day, where we bring migrant youth to Northwestern to tour campus and shadow PhD students. These events center social justice by providing opportunities for migrant youth to learn about the different sciences, explore potential career paths, and establish friendships and connections with scientists. Similarly, these events provide an opportunity for Northwestern scientists to mentor migrant youth, communicate their research to a general audience, and teach science through hands-on activities."
Tarushi Sharma
"The primary purpose of this project is to enhance accessible literacy on various psychiatric conditions, addressing the currently sparse literary selection at the hospital. In an environment where leisure activities are limited to TV, board games, and restricted computer time, there is a surplus of downtime. By offering focused, curated, and up-to-date literature accessible to various reading levels and abilities, we aim to empower patients to advocate for themselves, comprehend their conditions, and make better use of inpatient care—an immediacy and access to help that is notably absent once in outpatient psychiatric/behavioral health care."
"[...] an innovative and community-focused project that seeks to meaningfully integrate the perspectives of Africans into the presentation and curation of their material culture. The proposed project leverages 3D digitization and visualization technologies, such as 3D photogrammetry and Virtual Reality, to allow Liberians to intimately experience Liberian objects in Chicago collections, and become active participants in the curation and interpretation of their dispersed material culture."
"This mini-grant will help pilot NPEP’s first wellness-themed curriculum, known as the quarterly “wellness workshops.” These activities will supplement not only the academic curriculum, but also ongoing volunteer coordination of: the weekly wellness packets; individual check-ins; and special events (like the holiday card/book drive). The benefit of this curriculum is two fold: it will strengthen pathways towards community-building and team work, and culminate in the co-development of additional student resources."
"In recent years, the Women’s Center has begun forging an identity as a site of public history, primarily through the formation of the GPS guided audio Feminist Campus Tour. At present, the tour features five stops on South campus. It is narrated by Women’s Center Director Sarah Brown and includes interviews with students at the Women’s Residential College, a University Librarian, and staff at the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center, to name a few. It also makes use of archival audio such as a 2018 speech by Bursar’s Takeover organizer Kathryn Ogletree and the 1970 radio broadcast of the student strike on Deering Meadow led by Eva Jefferson. The tour lives in conversation with two additional Social Justice Tours – Indigenous and Black Experience—and the three have been offered together for incoming faculty and as part of special programming. The Feminist Campus Tour is not only an extension of the Women’s Center’s commitments to feminism, activism, and social change, but also provides students with an opportunity to see how their activism fits within a larger history of activism at Northwestern."
"The Indigenous Graduate Student Collective is a group that is open to all, but primarily consists of graduate students, whose goals are:
1. Build a thriving on-campus community for Indigenous students, staff, faculty as well as non-Indigenous co-conspirators.
2. Grow Northwestern’s relations with surrounding Indigenous communities and nations, both locally and internationally.
3. Promote and stimulate conversations on Indigenous peoples in the Americas and globally at Northwestern University. We seek to engage, discuss and complicate ideas of Indigeneity, belonging, sovereignty, resurgence, decolonization, resistance and genocide by engaging with scholars, artists, and activists who are concerned with these issues."