Building Sustainable Grant Cultures at Two-Year Colleges: Lessons from Project Vision on Early Ideation, Presidential Mentorship, and National Teaming

Many two-year colleges (2YC) in the United States have never submitted a federal grant proposal. Project Vision (PV), an NSF-funded project that ran from May 2020 through April 2026, worked at the stage most mentoring programs skip, institutional alignment and presidential engagement, before proposal writing began. This work was done with five cohorts, 28 states, and 73 colleges. Fifty-eight of them had no NSF proposal history in the prior decade. Over the life of the project, 48 mentee colleges submitted ATE grant proposals. Twenty‑three of them received awards, and 19 chose to submit again. After analyzing multiple data sources, the team determined that four factors drove the results: 1) Ideation embedded in an institutional strategy before proposal writing. 2) Treating presidential mentorship as a culture change mechanism, not a formality. 3) Front-end preparation needs to be kept functionally separate from proposal development. 4) A connector function, not anticipated by PV at the outset, but which ended up extending the approach into other federal funding sources in year 6. This work demonstrates that a primary driver, institutional readiness and alignment, can be intentionally developed in a short period of time and help many 2YCs find a path to sustainable funding.