Who's This For
This issue is for anyone who wants to find efficiency in their broader impacts work. Anyone seeking collegiality with others doing societal impact work. Anyone who's frustrated by the compartmentalization of treating each project's broader impacts as separate from the last.
It's a shift in thinking that came from the Broader Impacts Design project and university networks who recognized that research has a legacy trajectory. Why shouldn't broader impacts have one too?
The Partnership Moment
You're writing your third NSF proposal. Each time, you've started fresh with broader impacts. Different partners. Different activities. Different framings.
Looking back, you see missed opportunities. The relationship you built with a museum for one project could have deepened over subsequent projects. The mentorship structure you developed could have evolved instead of being reinvented. The data you collected about what works could have informed your next proposal.
But each project was its own island. You did broader impacts for that grant, then moved on.