Date: Saturday, May 30, 2026
Hi, I’m Alicia Kiremire, Owner of FlowStream Management in Ruston, Louisiana. I found evaluation after I was an engineer, STEM academic advisor, project manager, and grant writer.
The work I’ll share in this post brings together two of my favorite things – grants and capacity development! Specifically, our framework focuses on university STEM faculty; but you can consider adapting it with anyone pursuing external funding for their work.
This lesson is useful in framing our work as evaluators in the world around us. We have all experienced the impact funding can have in our ability to keep doing great work, both in programs and in their evaluation. In universities without large, supportive research infrastructure, STEM faculty can face barriers in pursuing funding. And that affects not only their own ability to sustain meaningful work, but also their evaluation budgets to measure the meaningful work.
In 2024, I worked with an interdisciplinary group to reach out to STEM faculty in non-R1 universities. We wanted to understand a) faculty’s most common barriers to pursuing external funding, b) processes that have built their capacity to pursue funding, and c) small outcomes that have led to their success with external funding. We presented our pilot study findings in an ASEE paper entitled Unveiling the mystery: A capacity development framework for early-career STEM educators pursuing external funding.
Created from our brilliant faculty participants’ lived experiences, this resource is useful to guide other faculty in universities with limited support for pursuing external funding. This may be particularly useful for evaluators who partner with STEM education researchers early in the proposal development process and who are involved in identifying sources of external funding.
Collabo-gleaning relationships are those in which an individual STEM faculty/researcher intentionally collaborates with a more experienced researcher in order to build their own capacity for pursuing external funding.
We love this strategy because it focuses not on improvements for university research offices, but rather on what the individual faculty has the power to do in building their own capacity. Collabo-gleaning also defines success as capacity built, not just grants won. It counts the wins faculty can control: building relationships, sharpening skills, and taking deliberate steps toward funding with each submission.
Here is the full Collabo-Gleaning Framework, with both process-related and outcome-related dimensions:
Faculty can use our team’s self-assessment to uncover their individualized needs, potential collabo-gleaning relationships, and next steps in building their capacity.
Finally, I want to shout out to my collaborators in this work, Dr. Allie DeLeo-Allen, Dr. Katie Evans, Dr. Anne Case Hanks, Dr. Krystal Corbett Cruse, and Dr. Kacie Mennie.
The American Evaluation Association is hosting STEM Education and Training TIG Week with our colleagues in the STEM Education and Training Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our STEM Education and Training TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.