From the Desk of Northeast SARE Director Dr. Teresa Leslie
This is part of a quarterly series on changes at Northeast SARE click here to subscribe to future editions.
I would like to take this opportunity to wish all of you a Happy New Year! It is amazing for me to say that I have completed my first year as the Regional Director of Northeast SARE. Time really does fly! In this communication, I am excited to announce that in 2024, we saw record numbers of grant applications.
For our large grant programs, which require pre-proposals, the Research and Education program received 91 applications, Novel Approaches received 111 applications, and our Professional Development program received 37 applications. For our small grant program, Farmer Grants received 91 proposals, Graduate Student Grants received 96 applications, and the Partnership Grant received 45 applications. The Historically Underserved Farmer (HUF) Grant program received 168 applications. WOW! These are record highs and reflect the importance of Northeast SARE to our regional farmers and farming communities.
In 2024, we also launched our Technical Assistance Program (TAP), which ran parallel to the HUF grant. We are still collecting data to evaluate this program, but early indications suggest that applicants were very satisfied with this support. We also had an excellent cohort of Technical Assistants. Thank you to each Technical Assistant who contributed to the success of this program! In the future, we hope to expand the TAP across all grant programs, particularly the Farmer Grant.
We believe that the high number of applications we are now receiving reflects our improved outreach. In both developing and refining our outreach strategy, we, in collaboration with the University of Vermont, have adopted Salesforce. We hope Salesforce will allow us to better measure our success and identify areas for improvement.
We invite you to celebrate this success with us as we move into the new year. We plan to continue our outreach efforts so that we can build new and lasting relationships in the future!