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 awards scheduled to end this year, the team is focused on what it can leave behind: stronger grants and sponsored-research infrastructure, expanded industry and educational partnerships, research pathways connecting students with four-year institutions, and a best-practices toolbox that could serve as a template for other community colleges.

Playbooks Built to Travel

The urge to build something other people can reuse runs 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. 

“The NSF EPIIC grant has created a strong foundation for collaboration among education and industry partners,” says Joe McMichael, Vice Chancellor of Ivy+ Career Link at Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana. “Sustaining this momentum beyond the grant period is essential to ensure these partnerships continue to drive workforce innovation, expand opportunities for students, and meet the evolving talent needs of advanced manufacturing.”

Habits That Become Routine

Some of the most durable work isn’t a document or a tool at all, but rather 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 — helps faculty and staff develop the skills to build and sustain external partnerships, embedding that expertise more broadly across the institution.

BOOST awardees have similary poured 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.

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 — including UT Permian Basin, Northern Virginia Community College and Frostburg State University — is building applied-research and industry-R&D capacity and developing a shared internal assessment tool, with individual campuses also pursuing efforts such as standardized partnering agreements. Together, these activities are designed to position the institutions for stronger regional leadership.

In rural regions, RREDI institutions are building higher-education innovation hubs that bring students, industry partners and communities into closer collaboration. 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.”