by Megan Senseney
In December 2008, I graduated into a freeze. Toward the conclusion of my final semester in graduate school, I began receiving notices from prospective employers in response to my initial flurry of applications. Not only was I not the successful candidate, there was no successful candidate. There would be no hires because hiring was frozen. I remember a long, cold drive from Champaign, IL back to my parents’ home in New Jersey. For Christmas, I said, I just wanted a job. My Christmas miracle came in the form of grant funding, a position on an NHPRC records management and archival processing project. On December 23rd, I negotiated in the dressing room of an Ann Taylor Loft while accompanying my sister on her holiday shopping. To celebrate, I bought myself some work clothes.
I was the last person hired before a blanket freeze was implemented at the organization that January. During my first weeks on the job, while I attended orientation and watched President Obama’s historic inauguration, the institution grappled with the economic downturn. First the highest-level administrators took a voluntary pay cut. Layoffs began soon after. I was told that, despite a general last-in-first-out approach, I was shielded because my funding came from elsewhere. Unlike so many contingent workers, my term contract was a kind of protection against the worst months of the recession.
A few years later, I found myself back in Illinois and working as a project coordinator for the iSchool. I was hired on a permanent line that was then parceled out and allocated to as many as five different grant projects at a given time. At first I was bewildered and overwhelmed by the sheer variety of projects, but over time I grew into the role. I also learned that by getting in on the ground floor and writing proposals of my own, I could help grow my career and establish levels of autonomy that are otherwise unavailable to non-tenure-line academic professionals. Grant writing became an avenue for achieving professional satisfaction. And, as the state of Illinois devolved into a budget crisis of its own, I once again found that soft money offered protection against precarity. I continued on through a series of grant-funded initiatives from 2011-2018, shifting from a role as project coordinator to research scientist as I stepped into leadership roles on new awards.
By the time I attended the first forum of the Collective Responsibility project, I had accepted a new position as a library department head at a land-grant research university, and I had established a perception of grant funding as a strategic opportunity that helps develop leadership and build resilience in the face of uncertainty. This perspective stems from a particular place and time, and it also reveals a degree of privilege and good fortune that eased my path. I was fortunate to have had a series of supervisors who served as mentors, advocates, and champions for my career. I was fortunate to have social support from my family during career transitions. I never experienced gaps in health care as a result of contract termination or severe financial strain during periods of cross-country relocation. As for privilege, I was a young white woman with a strong network, a spouse with stable employment, and (until recently) no dependents. Based on the survey analysis presented at the forum, my experience is not representative of grant-funded labor in libraries. But it reveals a set of conditions in which grant funding can support the workforce rather than stymie it.
Now that I am in a position of leadership within libraries, I am well situated to set strategic priorities around proposal development and grants management. In fact, I have just concluded a Grants Infrastructure Taskforce designed to build my library’s capacity for developing a robust portfolio of extramural funding. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to participate in the Collective Responsibility forum because it forced me to reconcile the positive and negative effects of grant-based labor on the library workforce. I am particularly grateful to the forum participants who generously shared their experiences over the course of the two days. Following the forum, I spent some time reflecting on a set of initial recommendations to propose at my institution:
- Allocate permanent staff time to grant projects wherever possible.
- Use back-fill funds to invest in skill building, professional development, and the cultivation of leaders from within the organization.
- Leverage the flexibility of an expanding grants portfolio to explore opportunities for new, permanent hires.
- Adopt an ethic of care when employing and mentoring workers in term-limited contracts by offering equitable compensation, establishing honest expectations regarding the potential for renewal, and actively supporting their search for new employment as the contract draws to a close.
- Consider limiting recruitment to local and regional pools for positions that will conclude within a year or pose potential hardships due to limited benefits (such as lack of funds for relocation).
- Support project-based workers by integrating them into the day-to-day activities of the organization and nominating them to serve as representatives when disseminating project deliverables to external colleagues and stakeholders
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My hope is to establish an institutional culture of grant-seeking that builds resilience and fosters professional development, one that acknowledges what an organization owes to the individuals that comprise it. I am excited to hone and refine these initial recommendations at the Practices forum, and I am honored to learn alongside the organizers and participants as we identify generalizable best practices for funding agencies and LAM institutions.