Progress 01/01/24 to 12/31/24
Outputs
Target Audience:The Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships strives to serve the entire population of Vermont. The University of Vermont's Office of Engagement, which is integrated with the Leahy Institute in mission and objectives, was created to ensure that Vermonters have access to UVM's resources and educational opportunities via research partnerships, students, and faculty. The Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships works in tandem with the Office of Engagement to ensure that Vermont's rural places have an opportunity to access financial support in their collaborations with UVM entities. This combination of engagement and partnership helps to build impactful solutions that drive positive change for Vermont and beyond. Vermont is designated as a rural state by the United States Census, with nearly two-thirds of its residents living in rural areas and no municipalities larger than 50,000 residents (US Census, 2020). With this context in mind, we consider the entire state of Vermont to be rural, and therefore consider the entire state, including all 14 counties, as our target audience. Targeted outreach across the state is done systematically through engagement and partnership development with regional and local organizations. For example, Vermont utilizes twelve Regional Development Corporations and Regional Planning Commissions to oversee economic and community development, respectively. Strong partnerships with these organizations allow for large scale dissemination of information regarding the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships to constituents across Vermont. These partnerships also serve as a conduit to communities across the state and allow the Leahy Institute to understand place-based community needs across our thematic areas, which include: regenerative agriculture; community schools; transit and housing solutions; remote and co-working practices; resilient energy systems; health ecosystems; access to rural health care; and policy and governance. In addition to these critical regional partnerships, the Leahy Institute leverages relationships with other universities and higher education entities, the business and entrepreneurship communities, non-profits, and government entities in order both understand rural challenges across contexts and facilitate collaborative solution development. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?The Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships has provided professional development for all staff in the areas of grant and program management, and leadership. Members of the Leahy Institute staff have participated in professional development programming, including the Vermont Leadership Institute and Leadership Lake Champlain, and attended relevant conferences including the American Society of Public Administration annual conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Center on Rural Innovation Conference in Red Wing, Minnesota. Additionally, many of the Leahy Institute's programs foster professional development and training opportunities for potential partners, as well as recipients of programming across Vermont. For example, a first round Leahy Institute grant, called the "Vermont Local Government Institute" provides current and aspiring town managers with training and support through an eight-course certificate program that is imparting tangible skills, best practices, and sound advice from instructors, many of whom are, or have been, town managers themselves. Eighteen professionals, many of them new and mid-career managers, assistant managers, or municipal department supervisors, enrolled the course for the Fall 2024 semester. The Leahy Institute grant covers the cost of tuition, and the associated administrative costs of running a certificate program. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Across Vermont, the results of the Leahy Institute's work are disseminated in a variety of ways. First, we maintain a monthly newsletter that reaches approximately 4,500 subscribers, and updates readers about the happenings at the Leahy Institute and provides updates on our funded projects. Additionally, we communicate news and updates about the Leahy Institute via our RISE Summit email list, which has 5,900 emails on it. News stories and social media features about our programming, funded projects, and partnerships are regularly featured in a variety of news outlets and pages with varying degrees of reach and are posted on our website and social media platforms. A major component of how we disseminate the results of our work is through our engagement at events across Vermont. Leahy Institute staff present on our work multiples times a month, including at prominent venues like Vermont's annual Economic Conference, the Vermont Community Leaders Conference, the Southern Vermont Economic Conference, the Vermont Non-Profit Summit, and Vermont's See Change Sessions. All of the first round of funded grants were celebrated and featured at the second annual RISE Summit, held at the University of Vermont, which had over 900 attendees. We also monitor where our funded projects are disseminating results of their work. For example, Leahy Institute grantees creating a comprehensive map of Vermont's wastewater infrastructure and had the opportunity to share their methodology and early findings with the Green Mountain Water Environmental Association Trade Show. From a national perspective, Leahy Institute staff have shared out the results of our first year of programming in a variety of venues, including conferences targeted towards academic and practitioner audiences. The work of the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships, and the consortium of Rural Partnership Institutes, was presented at the 2024 Rural Sociology Society Summit in Madison, Wisconsin; and the Community Schools Annual Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?With the input of the I-Works Advisory Board, Leahy Institute staff, and community leaders, the Leahy Institute developed a 2025-2028 Strategic Plan that will guide our activities through the end of the grant lifecycle. In the next reporting period, we intend to do the following across the four goals established in our Strategic Plan, which integrate goals from the previous year, including funding innovative rural partnerships; delivering data services; build partnerships for rural capacity; provide student engagement activities to build community resilience; and hold convenings. Goal 1: Engage faculty, staff and students across the University with community organizations to develop and sustain high-impact partnerships that advance community and economic development in all areas in Vermont and in ways that inform national conversations on rural development. In FY25, we plan to expand and strengthen the roster of UVM faculty for community engaged research and technical assistance across priority focus areas, grow quality engagement opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, nurture partnerships in addition to our grant program to advance economic and community development, and convene events and conversations that advance UVM-community collaboration. This goal also includes the proliferation of our engagement initiatives, including data services, partnerships for rural capacity, student engagement for a resilient Vermont, along with our summer internship programming and new co-working consortium. Goal 2: Continuously improve our partnership grant program to encourage engagement, build highly effective research partnerships and bring innovative solutions to rural challenges. In FY25, the Leahy Institute will complete and evaluate our second grant awards process and initiate the third round of grant awards, collaborate with funding partners to jointly support partnership projects, and develop sustainability models for our funded partners whose funding from the Leahy Institute has ended to maintain the impact of partnership projects. Goal 3: Build recognition and commitment to UVM engagement in Vermont and to the nation related to its land grant mission. In FY25, the Leahy Institute will build upon our commitment to disseminating results of our programming and grants by creating and executing a communications plan to ensure that stories of all Leahy Institute activities reach key audiences on campus, across Vermont, and nationally. Additionally, there will be an increased prioritization of highlighting the work of the Leahy Institute and our partners in national academic and practitioner venues. We also plan to develop guidance resources to ensure that people who are looking to collaborate with UVM know how to most effectively engage with the University. We hope to capture this work through our communications to ensure the value of this work is understood in both internal university and external community contexts. Goal 4: Build the foundation for the long term organizational and financial stability of the Leahy Institute Finally, we hope to spend FY25 working internally to support staff success and growth, update systems to support efficiency, functionality, and continuous improvement, build out clearer expectations for our I-Works board, and identify and pursue external funding opportunities.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Funding Collaborative Research Focused on Rural Community Impact 2024 was the first year that the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships administered partnership and capacity grants across Vermont. During FY24, we selected, funded, and managed thirteen projects, collectively worth $1.7 million, that supported a variety of partnerships across the state of Vermont. These thirteen projects were selected from a pool of 145 Letters of Intent, which established many new connections for the Leahy Institute. Funded projects include collaborative projects related to rural health, housing and infrastructure, community schools, and agriculture. They represent programming across all of Vermont's 14 counties, with a strong concentration in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, and engage community partners that represent businesses and startups, non-profits, government agencies, and community organizations. In June of 2024, the Leahy Institute opened our second request for proposals, and by December 2024 had selected sixteen projects, with total funding of $2.4 million. The period of performance for these projects begins in January 2025 and concludes in December 2025. These projects represent a commitment to building local capacity in Vermont's rural communities, supporting data-driven planning and decision-making, and exploring innovations in rural healthcare and education. Many of our projects also support developments in Vermont's agricultural industries, from Maple to precision agriculture to scientific advancements in hoof care for dairy cows. We assess the impact of our grants through the development of collaborative metrics that represent both quantitative and qualitative indicators of success. Each project is asked to report on their respective metrics at the 6- and 12-month marks of their project and conclude with a reflection on the impact that their work had on the communities they engaged through this funding opportunity. Student Engagement A critical component of our work at the Leahy Institute is identifying opportunities for the integration and inclusion of students, our greatest assets, in our community-university partnerships. We also seek to engage students in a way that benefits the entirety of Vermont, by providing place-based opportunities for students that gets them out of the Greater Burlington area. The majority of our funded partnership projects have student interns and research assistants participating, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. In 2024, this program was replicated in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. In 2024, 11 students were hosted at Sterling College in Craftsbury, Vermont and hosted at a variety of different organizations and businesses in that region, including agricultural organizations, art hubs, schools, and economic development and planning agencies. This program will continue to run in 2025 in both the Northeast Kingdom and Vermont's White River Valley. Additionally, in 2024 we launched an initiative called "Student Engagement for a Resilient Vermont" that supports faculty members in the development of service-learning courses that support flood resilience in Vermont through professional development and partnership development opportunities. Engagement Initiatives The Leahy Institute's engagement initiatives are partnerships within the University of Vermont that leverage university resources, including research, students, and staff, to provide direct services to Vermont communities. These programs were developed to institutionalize the university's impact on Vermont, stemming from our ongoing engagement work across the state and inspired by some of the most critical needs identified by communities in the state. Our first engagement initiative, Data Services, provides community partners with access to community, economic, and workforce development data, along with support for data interpretation and use. This programming has been frequently cited as a critical resource for Vermont's regional and local economic development organizations, including the Regional Development Corporations and Economic Development Districts. Additionally, data is regularly provided to economic interest groups representing the outdoor recreation economy and creative economy, and our partners at the Vermont Council on Rural Development. In 2024, the Leahy Institute received additional funding from the Ford Foundation to support the further development of the Data Services program, which will be done in collaboration with the Center for Rural Studies and Complex Systems Institute, both at the University of Vermont. Additionally, following devastating flooding in Vermont in 2023 and 2024, the Leahy Institute partnered with the University of Vermont's Community Engaged Learning Office to support faculty in the development of flood-related service-learning coursework that would provide additional capacity to communities who are struggling to recover from floods and build their resilience. In 2024, four faculty fellows were onboarded in this collaborative program. A new engagement initiative was also launched in 2024, centered around a consortium of rural co-working and innovation hubs across Vermont. The Leahy Institute is facilitating a community of practice among these groups to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing. Each participating hub is also receiving support from a UVM student intern. Consortium Engagement A critical goal of the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships is to contribute to the national conversation around the role that land grant institutions play in supporting rural communities across the United States. With that in mind, we engaged with our partners at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Auburn University in Alabama on a monthly basis, and through participation in in-person meetings twice over the course of FY24. During monthly meetings, the consortium shared their successes and discussed opportunities for collaboration. The day prior to the UVM RISE Summit, representatives from all of the Rural Partnership Institutes, along with our program officer from USDA-NIFA, and senior leadership from UVM, spent a day long retreat discussing the opportunities surrounding the consortium. Additionally, representatives from all three institutes participated on a panel at the annual Rural Sociology Summit, hosted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Convenings In June 2023, the University of Vermont's Office of Engagement hosted the first annual Research, Innovation, Sustainability, and Entrepreneurship (RISE) Summit, in partnership with the Office of the Vice President of Research (OVPR). This convening of community leaders brought visibility to the Institute for Rural Partnerships as the funding program was being developed. In June 2024, we hosted the second annual RISE summit. In this second iteration, we highlighted the theme "Partners in Place" and offered opportunities to explore rural development through the lens of place-based research, entrepreneurship, and community endeavors. Over 900 people attended the second year of RISE, which showed a maintenance of momentum from year one. At the second RISE Summit, which took place on June 24th and 25th, 2024, Tony Pipa of the Brookings Institution and Dr. Chavonda Jacobs-Young from USDA were featured, along with panels on topics related to rural development. Speakers represented projects and collaborations funded by the Leahy Institute grant. Representatives from the Rural Partnership Institutes consortium, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Auburn University in Alabama, were in attendance. We featured a keynote panel with the directors of all three institutes, along with a poster session that featured research and projects from the other Rural Partnership Institutes.
Publications
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Progress 01/01/23 to 12/31/23
Outputs
Target Audience:The Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships strives to serve the entire population of Vermont. The University of Vermont's Office of Engagement, which is deeply connected to the Leahy Institute in mission and objectives, was created to ensure that Vermonters have access to UVM's resources and educational opportunities via researchers, students, and faculty. The Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships was established to work in partnership with the Office of Engagement to ensure that Vermont's rural places could be financially supported in their partnerships with various UVM entities. The mission of the Leahy Institute is to provide engagement opportunities and partnerships with the University of Vermont for the benefit of our rural places, and brings financial and technical assistance, access to UVM research, faculty expertise, student projects and internships, and established UVM startup and engagement programs. Alongside our partners, we work to collaborate on impactful solutions that drive positive change for Vermont and beyond. The Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships and Office of Engagement regularly conducts concerted outreach and fosters partnership development between UVM entities and community organizations, businesses, local and state government, and other universities and colleges across Vermont. Vermont is designated as a rural state by the United States Census with an estimated nearly two-thirds of its residents living in rural areas, and there are no towns with more than 50,000 residents (2020 US Census). With this context in mind, we consider the entire state of Vermont to be rural, and therefore consider the entire state, with all 14 counties, as part of our target audience. Insights from a 2021 report published by the UVM Office of Engagement and Center for Rural Studies were used to set the strategic directions for the Office of Engagement and subsequently the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships. Through this process, 75 leaders from across Vermont's counties and sectors were engaged, and their input was integrated into the development of the Leahy Institute's thematic areas. Targeted outreach across the state was done through engagement with regional and local organizations. For example, Vermont uses twelve Regional Development Corporations and Regional Planning Commissions to oversee economic development and community development, respectively. Strong partnerships with these organizations allowed for large scale dissemination of information regarding the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships to constituents across Vermont. Other partnerships with interest groups in the areas of universities and higher education, entrepreneurship and business, non-profits, and government were leveraged to engage with communities across Vermont. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?The Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships has provided professional development for all staff in the areas of grant and program management. The Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships Grant workshops, held on November 15, 16 and 20, and December 5, 2023, welcomed over 100 attendees via either in-person or Microsoft Teams attendance. These presentations offered valuable information on the intent and purpose of the Institute for Rural Partnerships, our partnership with USDA/NIFA and consortium with Univ. of Wisconsin Madison and Auburn, and how funds will be distributed to UVM and community partners who apply and are approved for an award. Wayne Maceyka and Michele Karode, Senior Outreach Professionals at the Office of Engagement/Leahy Institute, have been able to attend leadership training programs during this time. Wayne Maceyka attended the Vermont Leadership Institute run by the Snelling Center for Government, and Michele Karode participated in and continues to work through Leadership Champlain, a leadership and community development professional development cohort lead by the Lake Champlain Chamber of Commerce. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?The work of the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships is publicized through various channels. The Office of Engagement publishes a monthly newsletter that is distributed widely through a MailChimp mailing list; this publication covers engagement initiatives as well as Leahy Institute news and updates. The University of Vermont's Division of Strategic Communications has overseen the publication of two official UVM press releases regarding the Leahy Institute: one announcing the Institute for Rural Partnerships in December 2022, and a celebratory press release around the launch in November 2023. The Office of Engagement Newsletter reached an average of 4300 subscribers in 2023, with an average open rate of 40%. 2023 Month News recipients Opens %Opened Open Rate clicks click rate (per unique opens) January 4552 1911 42% 45.10% 85 4.40% February 4507 1742 38.60% 40.8% 85 5.10% March 4316 1828 42.35% 43.6% 196 4.20% April 4240 1615 38.09% 43.0% 86 5.30% May 4171 2537 60.82% 38.4% 99 6.20% June 4145 2352 57% 34.1% 101 7.20% July - - - - - - August 4193 1799 43% 44.0% 381 21.20% September 4238 2605 61% 38.4%% 385 5.40% October 4244 2585 61% 35.9% 383 6.30% November 4238 2406 57% 36.3% 270 6.70% Selections from UVM Strategic Communications: New UVM Institute Will Help Rural Communities Thrive: https://www.uvm.edu/news/story/new-uvm-institute-will-help-vermonts-rural-communities-thrive UVM Launches Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships https://www.uvm.edu/news/story/uvm-launches-leahy-institute-rural-partnerships UVM Ceremony to Open Patrick Leahy Building & Launch Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships The Office of Engagement employs two Outreach Professionals who regularly meet with community partners and internal UVM faculty and staff. The goal of these meetings is primarily to engage with the work being done in the community, but also to share the current goals and priorities of the Leahy Institute. Additionally, the Office of Engagement maintains a contact list of Leahy Institute workshop attendees, applicants, and awardees (as of 2024). This is the high-priority list of individuals who will receive Leahy Institute announcements before the public. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?Goal 1: Fund Innovative Rural Partnerships - In 2024, the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships will fund the first cycle of grant awards, which includes $1.7 million in funding across thirteen projects of varying scales and regional scopes. All projects funded through the Leahy Institute are focused on addressing critical rural challenges and feature a partnership between UVM and external organizations. Additionally, in 2024, we will launch the second round of grant opportunities, and offer implementation grants for first-year grants to expand the impact of their work into a second year. We aim to expand the number of funded projects in the second funding cycle. Goal 2: Deliver Data Services - In the coming year, the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships will provide ongoing data services to regional and local community organizations and governments to support their comprehensive economic development strategies, grant applications, and town and regional planning. In 2024, we will work to integrate UVM research into available offerings to community partners and consider the needs of data users operating at the local and regional scales to evolve data offerings to be more comprehensive and accurate. An advisory board is being developed to oversee this transition, and inter-university partnerships are being developed to amplify this program. Goal 3: Build Partnerships for Rural Capacity - A critical challenge identified by our community partners in Vermont is the governance of rural communities. In the next reporting period, we will continue to build partnerships and programming to address this issue through data services, professional development opportunities, research support, and systematic program development. This includes funding professional development opportunities for municipal leaders across Vermont, and research related to identifying community needs to inform our evolving strategy for supporting rural communities across Vermont. Goal 4: Provide Student Engagement Opportunities to Build Community Resilience -The Leahy Institute is thinking critically about the ways university offerings to students can provide hands-on experience in building community resilience through service learning, internships, and other instances of community engagement, and the role that students can play in filling capacity gaps at the community level. In 2024, we will be highlighting instances of student engagement that supports flood recovery and resilience through sponsorship and a panel at the Resilient Vermont Conference, and through ongoing conversations about the role that universities, and in particular students, can play in supporting communities after floods. Goal 5: Hold Convenings - In 2024, the Leahy Institute will bring together stakeholders and community members from across Vermont and the United States for a variety of forums, where solutions to rural challenges will be central conversations. We are hosting the second annual Research, Innovation, Sustainability, and Entrepreneurship (RISE) Summit in June 2024, themed around placemaking, and how community and economic development fits within that process. We are anticipating attendance from over 900 partners both in person and online, and will highlight our Leahy Institute funded partnerships. Additionally, we are supporting other convenings around the challenges facing rural communities in Vermont. In March 2024, we will co-sponsor the Resilient Vermont Conference, which will be held at Norwich University on March 19, 2024, and convene researchers, floodplain managers and emergency planners, and community members to discuss flood recovery and resilience efforts in Vermont. Additionally, many of the funded partnerships will have convenings supported by the Leahy Institute, and span issue areas from rural refugee resettlement to wastewater infrastructure.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Below is a selection of accomplishments which are in alignment with Leahy Institute mission, and includes: convenings, where Vermonters were brought together around themes of rural challenges; collaborations and research partnerships fostered by our office; student engagement opportunities that amplified the capacity of Vermont businesses and organizations; and our engagement with other Rural Partnership Institutes, which gave our work a national perspective and a collaborative spirit. *Convenings Convenings are an essential component of our mission at both the Office of Engagement and Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships, as they serve as a venue to connect and learn from those working in various industries across Vermont. In June 2023, the University of Vermont's Office of Engagement hosted the first annual Research, Innovation, Sustainability, and Entrepreneurship (RISE) Conference, in partnership with the Office of the Vice President of Research (OVPR). This convening of community leaders brought visibility to the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships as the funding program was being developed. Over 900 attendees had the opportunity to hear about cutting edge research and partnership in and across Vermont.This convening offered an unofficial launch opportunity for the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships. The RISE 2023 Conference was a success for the University, and our office will continue to host this event annually. The Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships was formally launched on November 10, 2023, with a ribbon-cutting event attended by retired US Senator Patrick Leahy, US Senator Peter Welch, UVM President Suresh Garimella, and Vermont Governor Phil Scott. Institute for Rural Partnership Consortium members from University of Wisconsin-Madison and Auburn University, as well as NIFA Program Leader Sarah Rocker, attended the event and a subsequent luncheon with the IFRP members. In addition to these larger, university-wide convenings, the Leahy Institute/Office of Engagement also hosted a focused convening focusing on the impacts of the July 2023 Vermont floods. The Office of Engagement hosted a Flood Research Breakfast in October 2023 with the goal of acknowledging these researchers and giving them a space to share experiences and connect with each other. *Fund Collaborative Research/Incubate Emerging Collaborations On November 10, 2023, the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships released the first request for proposals for our inaugural funding cycle. The RFP was targeted to organizations whose work positively impacts Vermont's rural communities, as well as the priority focus areas detailed in the IFRP-VT application ). Applications were accepted from nonprofit, for-profit, and start-up organizations, local governments, and internal UVM applicants. Letters of Intent were due on December 18, 2023, with responses scheduled for January 11, 2024. Information sessions were held prior to the Letter of Intent submission deadline, both in-person and via Microsoft Teams, to ensure that all interested applicants had access to information about the grant and the application process. The initial phase of the Request for Proposals was the submission of a Letter of Intent. This Letter of Intent process was marketed through publicly available workshops both in person at UVM's campus, and on Microsoft Teams. By the deadline of December 18, 2023, we had received 145 Letters of Intent--a number we were not expecting, but one that we consider a success. Through the Letter of Intent process, the Office of Engagement established many new contacts both on UVM's campus and out in the community. An unexpected outcome of the program was the opportunity to connect applicants who submitted Letters of Intent with similar outcomes and impacts, forming partnerships between parties not originally working alongside one another. Broader Impacts: The Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships participates in a committee that is exploring how to amplify faculty capacity to achieve broader impacts, defined by the National Science Foundation as "the potential to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes." The committee, convened by the UVM Research Development office, has carried out surveys to faculty to identify the challenges and barriers they face to broader impacts via partnerships with community organizations in Vermont, and the support they need to do this work well. Cells to Society: Since 2021, the UVM College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and UVM Extension have held a seminar series, called "Cells to Society" that focused on sharing research, education, and extension initiatives to promote connections, transfer of knowledge, transdisciplinary collaboration, and collective impact in alignment with the land grant mission. In late 2023, the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships and Extension proposed the evolution of this program into a university-wide seminar series that focuses on amplifying impactful community-university partnerships across Vermont. *Internship Program to Support Rural Vermonters A critical ingredient in effective university partnerships is the integration and inclusion of students, our greatest asset. A key goal of the work of the Office of Engagement, and now the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships, is to provide challenging opportunities for students across the state of Vermont. With the support of USDA/NIFA, the University of Vermont was able to pilot an internship program that resulted from a partnership between the Office of Engagement and the Central Vermont Economic Development Corporation (CVEDC) and brought students into rural counties across the state. This pilot program ran for ten weeks (May 30-Aug 4, 2023) and engaged a cohort of eleven interns at a total of nine sites in Central Vermont. CVEDC Executive Director, Melissa Bounty, used her network to identify and engage interested Central Vermont employers. Kristen Andrews, Internship Coordinator at the Office of Engagement, developed and managed the pilot, including leading weekly professional development workshops for the cohort of interns. Overall, the Central Vermont Summer Internship Project Pilot was considered a success by both our interns and participating businesses. Washington County businesses that had never hosted an intern before received financial and program support to do so. All expressed interest in continued partnership with UVM and in hiring more interns in the future. *Collaboration with other Rural Partnership Institutes sites It is of the utmost importance that the work we do at the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships is scalable and has implications for rural communities across the United States. For that reason, we are grateful for the opportunity to work in partnership with the other Rural Partnership Institutes. In 2023, we have had two significant collaborations with our fellow consortium members at Auburn University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The initial collaboration was the submission of our Consortium Report in October 2023, which outlined the respective agendas of the Rural Partnership Institutes, and points of convergence and collaboration. The University of Vermont was proud to host the launch event for our Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships on November 10, 2023, and we welcomed representatives from the consortium universities, as well as USDA/NIFA National Program Leader Dr. Sarah Rocker, PhD. USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack sent a video message expressing support for the Leahy Institute, and the Institute for Rural Partnerships consortium. The Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships hosted a collaborative lunch between the IFRP representatives in attendance. This lunch was a wonderful opportunity to meet face-to-face and share our experiences with IFRP implementation in our states.
Publications
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