September 27, 2023

The CAA Academic Alliance is an academic consortium that facilitates collaboration and communication across member institutions: engaging faculty, staff, and students in meaningful initiatives that enrich the academic environment, advance student success, and drive innovation and best practices in higher education.

The CAA Academic Alliance is turning to true innovators – faculty, staff and students from CAA member institutions – to generate powerful ideas that creatively address pressing policy challenges in higher education; fuel collaboration between institutions; enhance institutional excellence; and promote innovation in intellectual inquiry. The Alliance will support and champion these ideas through the Innovate/Collaborate (IN/CO) Grant Program, providing grants for CAA institutions’ project teams of up to $80,000 per team over two years.

IN/CO grants will support multi-institutional teams of faculty and staff in the exploration and development of creative approaches and best practices that positively impact student success, advance scholarship, and promote the dissemination of best practices in one of the following priority funding areas:

• Artificial intelligence (AI) and higher education
• Mental health/wellness
• Pandemic impacts on admissions and academics

Funding Guidelines

IN/CO grants will fund actionable, scalable initiatives that are:

• Designed to contribute lessons or best practices for the higher education community;
• Marketable for future academic publication or presentation at conferences; and
• Attractive to future foundation or sponsor funding beyond the IN/CO grant program.

Tools to Create Inter-Institutional Connections/Project Teams

Each proposal project team will consist of at least two (2) CAA Academic Alliance institutions, with one designated PI. Each award will be made directly to each institution as specified in the budget narrative. All project partners must be faculty or staff of a CAA Academic Alliance institution in good standing. In order to facilitate connections and collaborative partnerships, the following tools/resources have been created:

• Complete the Qualtrics survey if you are interested in being connected with collaborative research partners from other CAA institutions. To complete the Qualtrics survey, you will need to specify one of the three content areas listed under the Priority Funding Areas listed above. Please also include your email contact information as requested in the survey. The Qualtrics survey will close Thursday, October 5 @ 5pm.
• The Alliance will host a virtual Collaboration Forum on Thursday, October 12, 2023 @ 3pm to encourage inter-institutional partnerships, with virtual breakout sessions in the three topic areas. Complete the Qualtrics survey to receive a calendar invite and Zoom link via email for the session.

More Information

View the Full Round 4 RFP Overview

Download the Short Form Application [Word]