The Latest: How $141K Became $5 Million ☺️

👋 Welcome to the October edition of The Latest, where everyone’s Halloween decorations (hello, Mr. Twelve Foot Skeleton!) are bringing us so much joy. 👻    

This month’s newsletter is just 944 words — a quick 3-4 minute read.  

🎉 Announcing: National Disability Center for Student Success

Here’s the inside scoop just for The Latest subscribers! 

• I am thrilled to announce our team received a $5 million grant to launch the National Disability Center for Student Success.

Check out our goals, subscribe to our emails, and stay tuned for more great news. 

• But how did it all come about? That’s another inside scoop just for you…. 

📣 The Main Takeaway: How $141K Became $5 Million 

It sounds like a rags to riches story. But here’s how we built an amazing community, some lessons learned, and how to apply these strategies into your own work. 

• Consider this your very own glimpse into “the room where it happens!”

Last we left you… We created the Collaborative for Access and Equity (Pilot), a partnership funded by Microsoft at The University of Texas at Austin. This $141,000 grant yielded an innovative space with ripple effects that went far and wide. It created key cornerstones for the future skyscraper of disabled student-centered work and:

• Established the importance of the experience of disabled students (living beyond the statistics and legal definitions). 

• Built a collaborative structure for dialog across all parties, ranging from students to faculty to administration and staff. 

• Identified concrete steps that can be done to improve the culture of access. The most important: A positive attitude. Access is more than accommodations!

The end of that project was in Fall 2022… 

• Top of mind for all involved: How to keep this work going? 

We needed both funding and infrastructure support to deepen the work and its impact beyond UT Austin. How and where to find this kind of funding was to be our quest for the coming year. We also wanted to act while our findings were fresh and momentum was on our side! 

Almost immediately after completing our final report, a new Institute for Educational Sciences (IES) call came out for a national center to explore the experiences of disabled students in postsecondary settings nationwide. $5 million over 5 years.

• We could hardly believe our luck! 

We worked diligently to prepare a submission to IES to create this new hub for research and outreach related to supporting disabled students in their education and training after high school.

• Our students assembled references needed for the literature review and construct definitions. 

• We met with all those amazing people both at UT Austin and at allied organizations to discuss mutually beneficial activities.

• Research design expertise from all sides added to the rich and complex 10 study set design plan we have for the Center!

• Many afternoons were spent with TexCEP admin staff, with deep dives into how the proposed project functions, how the budget is allocated, and how to maximize every penny. 

• Our graphic designer and copy editor made the work shine!

We submitted the work and held our collective breaths. After many long months of waiting and communications with our funder, the Center plan was accepted! 

Our funding goes towards stipends for Student Fellows and Faculty Cadre, personnel for communications and outreach, incentives for research participants, and resources needed to create high quality, relevant, and accessible materials for our community. Each of these activities is built on the lessons learned and successes we had in the Collaborative. 

If you’re looking to scale out from a pilot to a larger initiative, here are some things to keep in mind.

• Make it personal. Almost no one came on board through just an email. Make time for those 1:1 conversations that create shared alliances and buy in for your project. 

• Templates for the win. We used templates for letters of support, each project study, and ways to format our “ask” for each participant. 

• Think about structure AND content. One of the things I most enjoyed about this proposal was building out how the Center functions. Meetings, mentorship, and bringing a group of diverse and dynamic people together – all part of the planning process and not left to chance.

Plus, here’s a couple of extra tips for the post award and launch process.  

• Onboard everyone in a tailored but standard manner. Make sure all participants from your leadership team to your data analysts have shared core understanding of the project goals.

• Pay close attention to the public facing spaces! We are particularly mindful of how the website flows, our Center announcements, and where we can leverage the community as we spread the word. 

As we get deeper into the work, we are so grateful and excited for the opportunities: 

• To address one of the longest standing spaces of inequity for disabled people: Higher education and career readiness. 

• To create a relevant and actionable research foundation. 

• To build the pipeline of high quality researchers in the field. 

We’re off! 🚀

🥰 And Finally… 

The true joy is when we can share these moments together.

• So what a pleasure it was to make our first presentation as the National Disability Center for Student Success as a student-centered team! Many thanks to (from left to right) Ryan A. Mata, Lily Alvarez, and Desiree Lama for presenting with me.

We had a lovely conversation at the Human Development, Culture, and Learning Sciences program colloquium, talking about the Center mission, how we got there, and the plan for the next five years — plus taking excellent questions from the audience. 

Collaborating with and mentoring our students is always the brightest part of my day!