Grassroots Initiatives to Address Needs Together (GIANT)
At the IDEA Institute, we believe that everyone can contribute to engineering excellence.
The IDEA Institute supports scholarship, innovation, collaboration, and leadership that expand opportunities and strengthen our engineering community. The Grassroots Initiatives to Address Needs Together (GIANT) program provides funding of up to $13,000 to enable teams of students, postdocs, staff and faculty to propose and implement research-based initiatives that foster collaborative problem-solving and create pathways for all aspiring engineers and scientists.
Each year, the GIANT program seeks proposals from teams that want to actively collaborate with a specific population to jointly identify and address a need through project activities, measure the outcomes, document best practices, and disseminate the results. The specific population can be at any level, e.g., the public, K-12 students in low-resourced schools, undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, staff, and/or faculty within The Grainger College of Engineering. General areas of interest include but are not limited to:
- Recruitment, mentoring, development, retention, and/or engagement of individuals from groups underrepresented in STEM
- Integration of inclusion, diversity, equity, or access in engineering education
- K-12 outreach and STEM pipeline development
- Public policy and/or engagement of the public or local community
- Continuing education, cooperative education, and engineering workforce development
- Scholarly research of best practices at Illinois or other institutions and effective methods to institutionalize these best practices
A list of current and previous projects can be found in the GIANT Directory. The detailed proposal call will be available during the next funding cycle.