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Keeping partnerships organized is a shared challenge across the EPIIC community. Here, Houston City College marks a Memorandum of Understanding with Space Center Houston, one of its partners. Image courtesy of Rhonda Glover.

Sorting the Ecosystem: How EPIIC Awardees Categorize Their Partnerships

At a recent EPIIC PI meeting, a question surfaced that many awardees are working through: As industry, school, and community partners multiply, how do you keep track of who's who — and how deep each relationship runs? It’s a shared challenge. Several projects have run into the same trap — informal partnerships that tend to fade once the initial energy dies down or communication lapses. The remedy, most agree, is a deliberate system for defining, sorting, and tracking relationships. However, what that system looks like varies widely.

Levels of Engagement

For Andrea Welker, Dean of the School of Engineering at The College of New Jersey, the answer is a five-level framework adapted from the Network of Academic Corporate Relations Officers (NACRO). “This is how we define levels of engagement,” she says. NACRO has since pared its own model down to three tiers, but TCNJ prefers the fuller version. Once a year, Welker takes stock: “I look at all of the partnerships we have and decide what activities they have done to determine which level they are.” Her EPIIC project also involves creating boilerplate documents to define partnerships consistently. The framework itself isn’t the hard part. “The biggest hurdle has been our internal processes for Memoranda of Understanding,” she notes. “It takes forever.”

Sorting by Type

Rhonda Glover, Ecosystem Manager at Houston City College and part of the SPECIAL EPIIC project, sorts partners differently — by type rather than depth. “I don’t divide it up ... because everyone enters an agreement with us,” she explains. Her three working categories: industry partners hiring interns, schools receiving AI education, and collaborators who co-host events. “Those are just the three main sections for now, because everybody I've met sort of falls into that range so far.” Every Friday, Glover emails a spreadsheet snapshot to a core group of about ten decision-makers so that nothing slips through the cracks.

Rhonda Glover, Ecosystem Manager at Houston City College, takes part in NASA's S.U.I.T.S. challenge test week. HCC is a partner institution with NASA's Office of STEM Engagement. Image courtesy of Rhonda Glover.

A Role of Its Own

What makes that steady tracking possible is that partnerships are Glover’s entire job. Her position was written directly into the EPIIC grant — a full-time hire devoted to building and managing relationships rather than a task squeezed in around teaching or administration. “The primary expenditure of the grant is for me,” she says, describing it as a deliberate choice by the project's PI, who “knows the amount of time it takes and all the effort it takes to develop and build those relationships.”

Glover’s dedicated post isn't unique. Across the program, several awardees have funded people whose central job is partnerships: Spartanburg Community College created a Director of Manufacturing Partnerships, Tidewater hired an Employer Engagement Specialist, the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire is building a central Office of Corporate and Community Partnerships, and UT Permian Basin runs a dedicated partnership program through its Office of Innovation & Commercialization. Glover’s broad “ecosystem manager” remit — spanning industry, schools, students, and events — may be unusual, but the idea that relationships need a dedicated owner is one plenty of awardees share.

Building the Infrastructure

Others are investing in tools to make that tracking durable and better organized. Through the CIRCLET project, Hawai’i Community College, the College of Southern Nevada, and Northern Marianas College are pairing dedicated partnership staff with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, so agreements and projects are formally recorded rather than scattered across inboxes. 

BOOST partners are building similar infrastructure: Spartanburg Community College is turning program data into dashboards that track regional workforce needs, while Northeast State Community College is standing up a CRM and redesigning its curriculum advisory boards. And the five institutions in the ARISE project are jointly developing an internal assessment tool to gauge — and improve — each campus’s capacity to execute industry partnerships. 

Still, a tool is only as good as the people behind it. According to Douglas Sims, Dean of the College of Southern Nevada’s School of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics and a PI for the CIRCLET project, while CRMs preserve institutional knowledge, they do not create successful partnerships. “That responsibility rests with faculty who actively engage industry through ongoing collaboration, regular communication, and shared initiatives,” he says. “When faculty and industry partners work together as long-term collaborators, the CRM becomes more than a database, it becomes a record of strong, enduring partnerships that support student success and workforce development.”

Advice for New Cohorts

For newer awardees still deciding where to begin, the message is consistent — build your tracking method early, before the partnerships pile up. Glover’s advice is direct. “Start with your immediate need,” she says — then “find a channel to communicate, because otherwise your ecosystem is just going to hit roadblocks if people don’t know.”