Do this before Issue 3: Pick one potential partner from your broader impacts plan. Answer question 1 — just the mission question. If you can answer it in two specific sentences, you know this partner. If you can’t, that’s diagnostic: you’re not ready to propose partnership yet. You’re ready to learn more about them. Either answer takes 60 seconds and tells you something real.
Who's This For
You have a sense of your impact identity starting to form. Now you need to think about who else is in this story.
This issue is for anyone designing their first real partnership, anyone who tends to center themselves in broader impacts without seeing the full cast, and anyone who hasn't thought deeply about what partners actually need and want from collaboration.
The key insight: partners are protagonists in their own stories. When you truly get that, your partnership design changes.
The Partnership Moment
You're drafting a broader impacts section and you write something like: "The PI will partner with local organizations to expand the reach of research findings."
It sounds reasonable. But who are these organizations? What do they get from this? What's their story?
Too often, partners appear in proposals as interchangeable extras—background characters who exist to receive what the researcher provides. They fill a role, but they don't have depth.