I’m pleased to announce that we’ve just reopened AMICAL’s Small Grants program for new applications. The program was closed briefly while we revised the guidelines based on feedback from the Grant Review Committee and AMICAL Administration’s observations of previous applications and activity reports.

Among other things, the new guidelines bear the following improvements:

• Less emphasis is placed on previous AMICAL involvement: new participants are strongly encouraged!
• Staff exchanges and peer training have been distinguished from other (external) forms of professional development activity, and we’ve made it clearer how to strengthen, through planning processes, your Small Grants applications for this kind of activity.
• We’ve introduced questions that encourage you to think concretely about how activities relate to your own role and will have impact on your institution.
• For professional development activities, we’ve emphasized events that are smaller in terms of attendees, but extended in depth and length – and we’ve opened up the possibility of using Small Grants for semester-length online courses.
• For projects, we’ve provided clearer guidelines for timelining your plans, along with very brief “check-in” reporting along the way. The goal here is to provide AMICAL Admin with a way to monitor the healthy progress of projects, and to facilitate assistance in cases where a project may be facing difficulties.

The new application form is aligned much more closely with the review criteria, which we hope will make it easier for applicants to build successful proposals – and plan for successful activities.

The next deadline to apply for Small Grants is 10 December, at midnight wherever you happen to be. As a reminder, the program is open to staff and faculty at AMICAL Full and Affiliate member institutions (see the guidelines for full information). If you have any questions about the program, send them to contact@amicalnet.org.

We look forward to seeing your applications!

Special thanks go to the current and previous Grant Review Committees (the elected officers of AMICAL’s Coordinating Committee) for the time and effort spent improving the Small Grants program through their feedback.