When it comes to awards and funding, the end of an award doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the work. More often, it marks the moment when the tools, partnerships, and habits built along the way settle in and become part of an institution’s regular way of doing business.
That’s especially true across the EPIIC community. As first-round awards begin to wind down, teams aren’t packing up — they’re building things meant to outlast the funding. Consider the CAREERS Workforce collaboration between Ohlone College in California and Jefferson College in Missouri. With their Cohort 1 support ending this year, the team is focused on what it can leave behind: a grants and sponsored-research infrastructure, a set of new industry relationships, research pathways that connect students to four-year institutions, and a best-practices toolbox that any community college can pick up and use.
Playbooks Built to Travel
The urge to build something other people can reuse runs all through the EPIIC community. Take the GRIP cohort — Harper College, Ivy Tech, Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, Washburn Tech, and WSU Tech — which is retiring the old advisory committee that meets twice a year and calls it a day. In its place is the Business and Industry Leadership Team, or BILT, model, where regional employers help lead curriculum conversations and forecast the skills the workforce will need 12 to 36 months down the road. The goal was never just to run BILT on five campuses; it’s to hand the next two-year college a framework that’s ready to scale. BOOST in Virginia, Tennessee, and South Carolina are doing something similar with advanced-manufacturing, packaging what they’ve learned into electronic resources, procedures manuals, and toolkits others can lift and adapt.
Habits That Become Routine
Some of the most durable work isn’t a document or a tool at all — it’s a shift in how a campus operates day to day. Several teams are working to turn partnership-building into a permanent habit rather than a one-time, grant-funded experiment. At Western Washington, the SUPER Partnership Academy — part of EPIIC’s SUPER project — trains faculty and staff to build and sustain outside partnerships, so the know-how sticks around long after any single project wraps.
BOOST awardees are pouring energy into faculty and staff development by launching a Regional Learning Community to support ongoing collaboration, shared learning, and coordinated program improvement in advanced manufacturing. “The dialogue includes industry trends, curriculum modernization, work-based learning experiences, and instructional practices ensuring programs remain responsive to evolving workforce needs and student success priorities,” says Jenefer Snyder, Associate Vice President for Sponsored Programs and Center for Teaching Excellence.
And at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, Faculty Partnership Fellows serve as departmental liaisons and make the case for counting industry engagement in tenure and promotion decisions — a change that, once it’s baked into how a campus evaluates its own people, tends to stay put.
“EPIIC has helped create space for meaningful departmental conversations about how we define and value applied research and collaboration with industry partners,” says Doug Dunham, Interim Director, Strategic Partnerships and Program Development at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. “By bringing these discussions into the context of tenure and promotion, it has encouraged us to think more intentionally about recognizing work that connects the university to real-world impact and long-term partnerships. Several departments have made changes in their policies as a result.”
Positioning for What Comes Next
Still other teams are using EPIIC as a launchpad for bigger moves. The ARISE cohort — UT Permian Basin, Northern Virginia Community College, and Frostburg State among them — is developing internal assessment tools, standardized partnering agreements, and applied-R&D capacity, all aimed at positioning each campus for regional leadership. In rural regions, RREDI institutions are building higher-ed innovation hubs that pull students, employers, and communities into the same orbit. And within the “Developing Emerging Technology Ecosystem Partnerships for PUIs” project, early pilots are hardening into models others can follow: Christopher Newport’s innovation hub, the Champlain College Exchange and its focus on emerging tech and AI, and Western Oregon’s faculty fellows, industry advisory board, and connection events that put students and industry partners in the same room.
“We are designing models like the Champlain Exchange and Christopher Newport’s Innovation Hub not only to establish and grow industry partnerships for our institutions, but in a way others can see our approach,” says Brian Hall, professor at Champlain College. “Shared information across the cohort and EPIIC grantees helps describe what may or may not work for PUIs with similar goals in similar ecosystems. As always, adaptation is important.”