Grant Funding Enables NC State to Reach More Rural Communities

As a land-grant institution, NC State is committed to benefiting people across North Carolina through the extraordinary work that takes place on campus. Whether those North Carolinians are enrolled as NC State students or not. Whether they live in big cities or not.

The philanthropic efforts of the NC State University Foundation are helping the Wolfpack fulfill that mission, especially in 2024-25.

For this fiscal year, which began July 1, 2024, the foundation awarded 10 grants totaling $427,003 to its affiliated colleges and units affiliated. These grants are supporting new and existing projects that might not have been funded otherwise, including two — one through the College of Education, one through the Poole College of Management — that will directly benefit North Carolinians living in rural areas.

FLIP-STEM

FLIP-STEM (Fostering Learning, Identity and Participation within Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) is part of the College of Education’s (CED) efforts to ensure that middle and high school students can pursue a college degree and a career in the STEM fields regardless of their geographical or socioeconomic background. This project leverages the strengths of faculty, staff and graduate student researchers from CED, the William and Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation, and the NC State Data Science and AI Academy.

FLIP-STEM focuses on the twin pillars of design justice and data science. Design justice involves designing programs — the learning environment, in this case — in ways that allow the end users — students, in this case — to have direct input. Design justice ensures that programs address the challenges that marginalized communities face by identifying inequalities, enabling locally driven design, and incorporating accessibility and inclusivity in design.

“For design justice, I would say the phrase that I often use — and it’s not my phrase, but I think it’s a powerful one — is, ‘Nothing about us without us.’ It’s truly led by the folks who are traditionally not centered,” said Jessica Hunt, a professor of mathematics education and special education at NC State who leads FLIP-STEM. “So, we’re trying to center students. We’re trying to center communities. We’re trying to show [in that centering] that they have knowledge — a lot of it — that should be leveraged that often, unfortunately, is not.”

All of this is accomplished via data science, or the gathering and analyzing of data to better guide in decision-making.

Initially funded as one of the college’s three interdisciplinary research hubs, FLIP-STEM received a 2024-25 grant from the NC State University Foundation to further its efforts. This fiscal year, FLIP-STEM will hold three Saturday workshops in conjunction with the North Carolina Math/Science Education Network (NC-MSEN) Pre-College Program, the William and Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation, and the NC State Data Science and AI Academy.

The first workshop took place in the fall and focused on design justice. The second set of workshops, slated for this spring, will focus on data science. NC-MSEN middle school students and teachers will participate in the three workshops.

Each workshop is designed to be collaborative and community-centered in order for participants to increase their knowledge of STEM topics, develop skills that will enable them to succeed in these fields and give them a pathway to a college education — whether or not they ultimately choose to major in a STEM program.

“I think, historically, we know that students in rural communities tend to be excluded and marginalized from innovative experiences in STEM, and may not have access to a broad range of experiences that might spark someone’s interest,” said Krista Glazewski, executive director of the College of Education’s William and Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation and the associate dean for translational research. “So, one of the goals is to really make sure that anything that’s kind of a hot topic right now, or new and different, that everyone in the state can benefit.”

FLIP-STEM aims to build on the success of these workshops in fiscal year 2025-26 by co-designing with students two place-based, expanded weekend camps centered on design justice and data science. These pilot camps will be held in partner rural counties developed from the MSEN activities and will connect FLIP-STEM’s principles and data science with local programs and strengths.

Ultimately, program leaders hope partner communities will be able to hold similar camps and workshops on their own in order to spread the principles taught in the pilot program.

“We’re really working to promote inclusiveness by centering diverse perspectives and voices as a function of our design,” Hunt said. “So, I think that can empower students not only to see themselves in STEM through their strength but also to identify and tackle the most profound challenges facing them in their community.”

“[The foundation grant] is giving us an opportunity to expand in a way that we weren’t going to be able to do without this support,” said Amy Walter, a research scholar with the Friday Institute and FLIP-STEM’s project manager and school liaison. “It is hugely helpful in growing our team, but then also being able to go to the places, collaborate with the communities, go into the communities, bring the resources that we have to meet them where they are. So, I can’t imagine doing the expanding part without the foundation grant.”

Long term, the College of Education plans to extend the work of the FLIP-STEM pilot program by securing federal funding — including from the National Science Foundation, as many aspects of the initiative align with its outreach and development efforts.

“A marker of success for us with [FLIP-STEM] is that we ourselves are different at the end of this, too,” Glazewski said. “That we gain new understandings. We gain new approaches. We gain new ways of partnering locally across the state of North Carolina.

“It’s not another extension of school; it’s not another come-in-and-teach-a-lesson to kids so that they can walk away with more knowledge than they had at the start of the day,” Glazewski added. “This is really about reciprocal partnership and all of us kind of co-learning together.”

To learn more about FLIP-STEM, visit go.ncsu.edu/flipstemhub.

Business HIRE

In a similar show of support for people living in North Carolina’s rural regions, the Poole College of Management’s Business HIRE (High-Impact Rural Experiences) program seeks to place business undergraduates in internships with companies in rural North Carolina counties. The NC State University Foundation awarded it a grant in 2024-25 as well.

Business HIRE will officially begin this summer with 11 Poole College students taking part in full-time, 12-week paid internships around the state. Participants will attend a pre-internship onboarding orientation in April and monthly professional development sessions, hosted by NC State’s Global Training Initiative, throughout the summer. Students will perform at least eight hours of community service over the course of their internships to provide them with additional interactions with the areas where they are living and working.

The benefits are expected to be numerous for students, companies and communities. Interns will receive real-world, on-the-job work experience — often more than they would at a comparable urban internship, since rural companies tend to give their interns a wider range of responsibilities. In turn, the companies will be able to generate additional economic impact for themselves and their counties, fill key positions and even save or create jobs that might not be possible otherwise. All of this in addition to the community service projects that will be completed.

“Our project stems from the fact that many North Carolina rural employers struggle to retain and recruit young talent,” said Tedd Szeto, assistant dean for undergraduate programs in the Poole College of Management. “So, as we are working on our side to attract students from rural counties, we also want to establish new pipelines and to open doors for rural employers who might not typically have the same access to or interest in our students.”

Thanks to the foundation’s grant funding, the interns will receive an additional $10 an hour on top of the employer pay rate of $15 an hour, or $4,800 in addition to the original $7,200 per internship for a total compensation of $12,000. According to a 2023 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, this will put Poole College interns $3 above the average internship pay rate and will enable them to better cover key expenses including housing.

According to a USDA report of rural employment, internship opportunities and hourly pay rates are on the rise in the U.S. However, rural companies still encounter more challenges when it comes to acquiring young talent. The pay rate, company name recognition, location, lifestyle and housing options are important variables that factor into students’ decisions regarding internships, and rural companies struggle to compete with larger, urban-based employers that often can provide more attractive and lucrative opportunities.

“Much of the industry that powers the state of North Carolina is rural, and yet that is also the group that struggles to recruit and retain top talent because they’re not in locations that typically jump off the page to recent graduates,” said Tyler Wiersma, director of High-Impact Experiences for Poole College. “This opportunity levels the playing field for our rural partners.”

Business HIRE will bring even more resources and know-how to bear on this effort by operating in collaboration with the Division of Academic and Student Affairs’ (DASA) Rural Works! Program, which is part of DASA’s Career Development Center, and the Provost Office’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP). Business HIRE will build on the former program by placing NC State students in internships and supplement their compensation to make it more competitive with urban placements. The QEP’s theme for 2024 through 2029 is, fittingly, “Packways: Learning by Doing.” Its focus is on high-impact experiences that enhance student learning and success.

Rural Works! placed 92 students in internships with 56 North Carolina companies in 2023, with the interns generating an average financial impact of $184,000 per company and helping retain or create 84 jobs. Of the more than 350 NC State students who have participated in Rural Works! thus far, almost all have been undergraduates in the College of Engineering. Partnering with Business HIRE will give even more students the opportunity to learn, grow and succeed through paid internships while enabling rural companies to take advantage of other NC State specialties.

“Thanks to the foundation and the grant, we’ve tapped into something that is clearly a high need not just from the employer side, but even from our students,” Szeto said. “We are continuing to see an increase in the number of applications and admittance and acceptances from our rural and our under-resourced counties as well, so we’re hoping that this might be attractive to those students — to send them home for the summer and be able to give back to their communities.”

“I don’t think this would have happened without the grant from the foundation,” Wiersma said. “It took something that was an informal idea and made it into a formal initiative, and it gave us the means to accomplish what we set out to do.”

To learn more about Business HIRE, visit go.ncsu.edu/businesshire.

How Foundation Grants Work

The funding for these initiatives comes as part of the NC State University Foundation’s annual grant program. Several colleges such as the College of Engineering and College of Agriculture and Life Sciences work with their own foundations and governing boards, but other colleges and units work through the combined NC State University Foundation.

Each spring, this foundation invites the colleges and units associated with it to submit grant proposals for non-recurring funds that are awarded for the fiscal year beginning that summer. Grant proposals can be for as much as $25,000 per year and are intended to help the college or unit implement a new program/initiative or expand on an existing one. Written submissions are accompanied by short videos explaining the importance of each grant to the enhancement of the undergraduate and graduate experiences at NC State.

The foundation’s Awards and Grants Committee members vote for their top choices at the annual board meeting, held in June. The board is made up of more than two dozen members, with Vice Chancellor for University Advancement Brian Sischo serving as president. Bentina Terry ’92 is the board’s current chair.

“The foundation grant program is so instrumental in helping the university fund projects within the individual school that might otherwise struggle with finding funding,” Terry said. “This funding can be just the spark an idea needs to become real and impactful.

“What I love most,” Terry added, “about the programs the foundation has been able to fund through our grant program is that these programs reach outside of the university walls and touch the communities in North Carolina in meaningful ways. The university should always be a resource to make our community better and apply great educational tools to real life.”

Eight other foundation grants were also awarded in the 2024-25 fiscal year. These grants include support for:

To learn more about how the NC State University Foundation, visit go.ncsu.edu/foundation-grants.