The past 2 weeks were focused on creating a budget for the Activism plan. I was not too surprised to see how drastically the financial requirements changed between the very rudimentary budget outlined as part of the Activism Plan write up and the detailed financial analysis. I was, however, pleasantly surprised to see the number of options for funding that were available. I certainly did not expect to see small grants that were in the order of a few thousands of dollars, but I found that there were plenty of those. Most of the small grants were intended to help schools purchase classroom supplies or enrichment material. Another piece of learning from Weeks 5 & 6 was how to write a grant application. There were plenty of examples online on what made a good grant application.
I also expanded the STEMLinks project a little to include monthly BlogTalkRadio shows – interviews with women in STEM careers focused on career advice, with live Q&A, so students can call in and get their questions answered by an expert.