The UVM FSRC is inviting proposals for small planning grants, aimed at teams of researchers who wish to apply for the second round of “Sustainability Metrics” grants. As an incentive, the FSRC can offer $3,000 for PI time to develop these ideas between June and August, for up to six PIs.

Context and Preview of Fall 2025 2nd Round Sustainability Metrics RFP

The call for proposals for the second round of Sustainability Metrics grants, to be released in August/September 2025, will solicit teams prepared to work on one of three production systems (Maple Syrup, Dairy and “diversified vegetable production”) or one of two underdeveloped dimensions of sustainability (Human/Health, Social). 

In an effort to develop a proposal structure that will excite the UVM research community and advance the research, the FSRC staff have made changes to the original RFP proposal. To make the task of measuring indicators more manageable for research teams, we have spent the past 6 months refining the indicator lists for three dimensions of sustainability (Economic, Environment, Production) and have identified two dimensions where more research is needed to define the indicators (Human/Health, Social). Additionally, we have decided to limit the number of dimensions each team must measure for the next call.

Production System Teams will be expected to choose metrics for the indicators specified for the refined Economic and Environment dimensions to:

a) evaluate the sustainability of the system across multiple locations defined by the teams and 

b) identify which of these indicators are driving (or primarily responsible for) the sustainability outcome. 

Production System Teams are expected to measure yield as well as all refined Economic and Environment indicators, for a total of 23 indicators (see framework page for reference). Indicators from the production dimension other than yield will not be required. If a team anticipates being unable to measure all 23 indicators, they will be expected to communicate which ones they will not measure and justify the decision. No new indicators will be permitted.

Note that Production System Teams will also be asked to work closely with the Social and Human/Health Teams, described below, to help develop indicators. 

Social and Human/Health Teams will work to select an appropriate set of indicators and metrics (with justification) to describe the dimension and to measure its sustainability. We will require cross-team collaboration as follows:

The Social Team must work with a Production System Team to explore social indicators as driving forces in the context of regional systems, as well as the interactions between different dimensions of sustainability.

The Human/Health Team must work with a Production System Team to develop and implement a set of indicators and metrics appropriate for production systems in New England.

Request for Planning Proposals

An improvement FSRC staff endeavor to make for round two of the Sustainability Metrics projects is facilitated and built-in collaboration between teams. To this end, we have designed this call for Sustainability Metrics Planning Proposals to build in time for team collaboration planning before the full call for proposals is due.

Inter-team collaboration has been a central goal of the Sustainability Metrics grant from the very beginning. Collaboration enables us to draw comparisons, conduct cross-system and dimension analyses, and examine interactions, synergies, and tradeoffs among sustainability indicators and dimensions.

The specific aim of the planning proposals is to allow time for teams to discuss, debate and plan how they will collaborate. Each team is expected to have a detailed plan that describes how they will collaborate with at least one other team. Note that the Human/Health and Social Teams are required to collaborate with at least one Production System Team and vice versa.

Some examples of collaboration might include co-developing survey questions and instruments, sharing baseline demographic and economic questions, leveraging datasets from other teams in secondary or joint analyses, and interpreting results from the perspectives of different dimensions, to name a few. 

The product from the planning grant should be a document describing each team’s collaboration plans that can be included in the full call for proposals for the next round of the Sustainability Metrics grant this fall.

The deadline for planning grant submissions is June 10^th, and proposers will be notified of decisions by June 30^th. 

The proposal must include the following:

1. The name of the PI whose time will be covered plus the amount of time requested.
2. The production system or dimension the PI intends to work on.
3. Three paragraphs describing how the PI will spend that time to plan, including key questions that will be addressed, and how they will be addressed (e.g. meetings, literature reviews).
4. Any PI who is awarded a planning grant must submit a full proposal in the fall.

Please submit your proposal to Polly Ericksen at polly.ericksen@uvm.edu.

The Food Systems Research Center (FSRC) is providing funding to maximize our scientific impact through open access publication charges, allowing the research results from FSRC work to be publicly available.

Eligibility and Conditions:

• Previously or currently funded FSRC projects and people are eligible (funded either under the CA 59-8062-9-009 AWD 34853 or the NACA 58-8090-2-002 AWD1102).
• Open access charges will be available for fully open access journals (i.e. where the entire journal is open access).  An exemption may be requested for open access charge for hybrid journals, but require additional information (see below).
• The FSRC will fund a maximum amount of three thousand dollars ($3,000) per request.  An individual cannot request more than six thousand dollars ($6,000) total from the fund, as first or corresponding author.
• Any funding received should be acknowledged in the funding section of your publication.  This information will be provided to you if your publication is provided funding.
• All funding is first come/first serve until the funds have been fully expended.

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