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STEM Outreach Grants Provide STEM Opportunities to Local Students
September 27, 2024September 27, 2024

STEM Outreach Grants Provide STEM Opportunities to Local Students

stemeastNCEast Alliance

This past summer NC East Alliance and STEM East awarded 9 Community Colleges in eastern North Carolina STEM Outreach Grants. This grant program was created to fund STEM-related day camps for youth in eastern NC at local community colleges within the STEM East Network. Each community college that applied for the grant was awarded $5,000 towards their summer STEM programming. Over 450 students participated in the camps that highlighted a variety of STEM Fields including aquaculture, solar energy, and drones.

“One of the primary goals of STEM East is to make young people aware of the great career opportunities in our region,” Wesley E. Beddard, a STEM East consultant, wrote in an email to area community college leaders recently. “Most of you have been doing STEM-related outreach and summer camps for some time. When I visited your campuses to discuss how STEM East could assist your colleges, many of you discussed these outreach camps, especially the funding challenges of conducting these camps due to state and local budget restrictions. We heard you and want to help!”

In addition to youth STEM summer camps, STEM East member community colleges hosted Industry In Schools Teacher workshops over the summer. Teachers had the opportunity to learn about prominent industry clusters in eastern North Carolina and the job opportunities within those clusters. All teachers that participated in the workshops left with a lesson plan to assist them with relating local job opportunities to their curriculum. Over 250 teachers participated in 9 workshops that highlighted the Smart Agriculture, Aviation and Aerospace, Blue Economy, BioPharma Manufacturing, Healthcare, and Green Energy industries in eastern NC.

The Nine Community Colleges that received STEM Outreach Grants for the summer are Beaufort Community College, Carteret Community College, College of The Albemarle, Halifax Community College, Lenoir Community College, Martin Community College, Pitt Community College, Roanoke Chowan Community College, and Wayne Community College.

NC East Alliance and STEM East are offering the STEM East Outreach Grants for the fall. Applications are currently being accepted. Interested community colleges that are members of the STEM East Network should contact Wesley Beddard, beddard@nceast.org, for more information.

STEM East is an education and workforce development initiative of NC East Alliance. Currently 30 school districts and 12 community colleges in eastern North Carolina are members of STEM East. The main mission the initiative is to maximize exposure of local career and training opportunities in eastern NC to achieve the goal of growing the future workforce of the region.