Below is a transcript of our conversation with Joe Garrison, University Budget Officer and Assistant to University President Neil MacKinnon for Strategic Planning
David Nicholas:
I'm David Nicholas, and this is Central Focus, a weekly look at research activity and innovative work from Central Michigan University students and faculty. CMU will host its first Go Grant symposium on Tuesday, February 10th in the Bove University Center. All are welcome to interact with the many projects launched in the first year of the Go Grant initiative. Joe Garrison is University Budget Officer and assistant to University President Neil McKinnon for strategic planning. He told me about the program and how it is engaging all to advance and enhance CMU's strategic plan…
Joe Garrison:
After President MacKinnon toured campus for the first 100 days and did hear from the campus community that there were ways that people wanted to get involved with our strategic plan. So, we are trying to connect each GO grant, however we can, to those four pillars of the strategic plan. And you're going to see a lot of interesting topics being discussed at the symposium that do link up to the strategic plan.
DN:
The idea of the breakdown is to how many things, in the variety of things, did we see all of those priorities reflected in at least some way or tending to go in one particular area of the plan.
JG:
So Go Grants did connect with one of the priorities, but they may have connected with many. We have a number of initiatives that really try to focus on enhancing the organizational culture. So that's priority three of the plan. You're going to see a lot of connections to the broader community, the local Mount Pleasant community, and our community relations committee. So, the Paint the Town Maroon Go Grant is a prime example of that. And we also had Fired Up Fest, which was a great festival that culminated right around the first football game of the year and brought thousands of people to the downtown and just really brought a lot of energy to the start of the academic year. Other areas are focused on sustainability, so making sure that we're leveraging our technologies to the best of our ability, embracing AI at the institution. Each GO grant does connect in one way, but it was really interesting to find some of the ones that connected to all four. So that had a recruitment piece that focused on student support, scholarly success, and engaging the communities, enhancing the organizational culture, and focusing on sustainability. So, the grant writers themselves and those who filled out all the applications were very thoughtful in tying their applications to each priority.
DN:
Was 27 picked as a number then because it was manageable, or at least in terms of the initial response for a first time trying something like this, that is what came to be? And what is the potential then to have many more grants approved, say, in subsequent years of this current strategic plan?
JG:
So, 27 was not a magic number. We had a very rigorous review process. The university's budget priorities committee was asked to review the grant applications. We ended up having 122 grant applications. Those were then refined, scaled back. We had a multi-layered process to really get input from faculty, staff, students, and administrators around campus to see how did things align with the plan, what funding level should certain things be at. But really what it came down to is that we knew we wanted to support roughly 1/4 of the ideas. So, 27 doesn't work mathematically. But what we did want to also stay within was the original budget for this. So, we leveraged one-time dollars from the universities, from the President's Fund for Excellence. And ultimately, what we ended up doing is originally thinking we were going to spend about $500,000 We had to extend that by about $75,000 because there were so many great ideas. Future rounds, we did want to make a splash this year. This was the first year of it. If there are future rounds of this moving forward and when those occur, maybe they're not going to be as many at once because there's a lot of logistics to manage behind the scenes when you're going through so many different initiatives at the same time. The biggest win here is getting people more involved across campus, getting people feeling invested in our strategic plan and getting this spirit of curiosity, spirit of trying things out and having new ideas, that has really helped us as an organization just kind of change some momentum at the institution.
DN:
Joe Garrison, thanks for giving us the overview of this and some of the inside details of some of these initiatives and how they'll play into the short-term and long-term future for the university. We appreciate the time.
JG:
Thanks so much, David.
