The UMRA Grants Committee is pleased to announce that we received 22 proposals for this year’s Professional Development Grants for Retirees (PDGR) competition. We will now review these proposals and decide which ones will be funded for the 2020–21 academic year.
The proposals represent 14 departments on the Twin Cities campus and two departments each at Duluth and Morris. This number is up considerably from recent years, and we attribute the difference to our revised application process. We reverted to the process we used before switching to a web-based system two years ago which, apparently, was discouraging to applicants.
When evaluating the new proposals, the members of the UMRA Grants Committee will look, in particular, for the professional development value of each. The winning proposals will be announced in March. Each award will provide up to $5,000 in funding from April 1, 2020, to June 30, 2021.