Supporting research that centers real people and their real lives.
The Office of Societal Impact Vision: Advance a university where research and creative inquiry consistently and equitably improve lives in Arizona and beyond by centering communities, strengthening practices for impactful research, and embedding societal impact across the research enterprise.
OSI offers a variety of professional development opportunities for graduate students, staff, faculty at all career stages, and community members. Our monthly Pathways to Impact (P2I) series covers topics including incorporating societal impact into research, working with community members, and evaluating impact. Recordings of many of our past webinars are available for viewing, along with associated resources. We also offer workshops on any of our webinar topics customized for your unit or department’s needs. Workshops help participants develop skills and knowledge to develop, implement and assess community-engaged, societally impactful research projects. We also collaborate with the Arizona Institute for Resilience on the Transdisciplinary Research Academy.
Our team is available to consult with faculty, staff, and graduate students on incorporating societal impact plans into their research proposals. The National Science Foundation continues to require Broader Impacts plans as one of their two review criteria, but many other funders require or encourage similar impact plans to more directly connect your research to a societal benefit. Our team can help researchers to explore and fine tune their impact goals, and often we can leverage our connections across campus and community, and knowledge of existing programs and infrastructure, to advise researchers on activities and partners that may be the right fit and right team to achieve their impact goals. We support the project team through the process of developing strong proposal narratives that articulate their plans to develop, implement, and assess their societal impact activities.
One of OSI's most important roles is to understand the needs of Arizona’s communities and community-based organizations and where those needs intersect with UA research and the potential for societal impact. We work to develop authentic relationships with non-profit and community organizations across Arizona, including Tribal communities, and sustain these relationships to support collaborative and community-based research partnerships and projects that connect and leverage both UA and community knowledge and expertise. Our team members have worked for and with community-based organizations for nearly three decades, and so we can help to identify the partners and audiences that are a fit for your research project. Our charge is partnership building for research impact, but this work has a scaffolded effect for other UA priorities such as student success, increasing public trust in science and higher education, and fulfilling UAs role as the state’s land grant institution.
We are happy to help researchers to think through the design of their community-based impact activities and programs. Our staff has deep experience in the design of collaborative, multi-organizational programs, and can help your proposal team to uncover aspects that you may not be anticipating, from timelines to budget considerations to good partnering practices. We work with researchers to provide introductions to potential partners as needed, and to collaboratively design their proposed impact activities. We are sometimes included in proposals to support the implementation of impact activities or assessment and can provide letters of support for our services. We collaborate with campus and community partners on several existing projects and initiatives that researchers can leverage for their own societal impact activities when aligned with their goals.
Most federal funding agencies require robust, often external evaluation of impact activities, including formal and informal education activities and community-engaged activities that have stated objectives and outcomes. All funders require some sort of annual reporting that includes an assessment of your funded project. Our team members have extensive experience with project evaluation, serving as evaluators on numerous projects from a variety of funders. Our team can provide support in developing evaluation plans suitable for proposals, and if the project is funded, work with the project team to further develop their evaluation plan and provide annual check-ins with teams. We have also developed a research impact assessment framework to document impact at the unit, college, and institutional level and are happy to consult with you about how you can apply this framework to describe your unit’s impact.