2020 Incentive Grants Award Winners

The Outreach and Engagement Incentive Grants Program serves to address significant community challenges by aligning interdisciplinary faculty, their expertise, their students, and their research. The incentive grants connect NC State faculty to applied scholarship opportunities in communities, stimulating interdisciplinary proposals to compete for funding that will foster innovation between faculty, staff, students, and community partners and help kickstart potential future research and programming.

The 2020 Incentive Grants Awarded proposals will receive $10,000 each to support work through June 2021. The three Incentive Grants Awardees are listed below with a brief description of their proposals.

Dr. Sarah Bowen, COVID-19 and Latinx Immigrants’ Experiences of Food Insecurity in Wake County: An Asset-Based Approach
This project aims to better understand the impact of COVID-19 on Latinx immigrants’ access to food and experiences of food insecurity, in order to help community and governmental groups develop responses that are more attuned to the needs of the Latinx community in Wake County. The project uses qualitative, participatory research methods with Latinx immigrants in Wake County to (1) investigate how access to food has changed for Latinx families in Wake County as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and (2) identify the key resources in Wake County that help Latinx immigrants families access food, as well as why families trust these particular resources and how they could be made more accessible.

Dr. Lincoln Larson, Enhancing Equity and Diverse Stakeholder Engagement in the Dix Park Planning Process
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The project aims to address a growing need: the need to enhance and diversify public participation in park planning and management. On a local scale, the work will provide opportunities for Wake County stakeholders to have a voice in the development of Dix Park. On a broader scale, this research will advance outreach efforts and scholarship focused on relevance, diversity, and inclusion (RDI) in public engagement, helping communities around the country build capacity to make a difference across diverse park planning contexts. Project objectives include identifying and interviewing underrepresented stakeholders, analyzing the data and synthesizing into a policy brief to facilitate community engagement and capacity building surrounding Dix Park.

Dr. Jackie Eunjung Relyea, iWolfpack Readers: Partnership for Online Afterschool Literacy Intervention for Elementary-Grade Students with Reading Difficulties 
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The goal of this project is to further develop and evaluate an existing afterschool intensive literacy intervention, called Wolfpack Readers program, by converting the program from face-to-face to an online format. The project aims to (1) develop a prototypical online afterschool literacy intervention model by refining and adapting the current in-person program to be delivered remotely, (2) examine the feasibility, usability, and efficacy of the iWolfpack Readers program on improving young struggling readers’ comprehension with informational text and reading engagement, and (3) build long-term research-practice partnerships and agendas that unite the needs in local contexts and interests of researchers, practitioners, and parents.