Wilmington Partnership announces mini-grant awardees for 2025-2026
The Wilmington Partnership, a place-based collaboration of the University of Delaware and the City of Wilmington, has awarded four mini-grants for the 2025-2026 academic year to support research partnerships between UD faculty, staff and students and community organizations. These mini-grant awards are funded each year with support from UD’s Community Engagement Initiative (CEI).
Projects are community driven, committed to a mutually beneficial relationship with the local partner, and advance equity for historically marginalized communities.
“We received an overwhelming number of strong proposals this year,” said Ann M. Aviles, associate professor of Human Development and Family Sciences, who leads the Wilmington Partnership. “It’s an indicator that faculty and their respective partners are interested in generating impactful, responsive, and rigorous community-engaged research that serves to meet the needs of the larger Wilmington community.”
Awarded up to $5,000, projects represent a range of issues, from educational outreach to Wilmington school children to providing a voice for the city’s displaced and unhoused communities.
“We are proud to support this collaborative research happening in Wilmington,” said Michael Vaughan, the University’s chief community engagement officer and faculty director of the Community Engagement Initiative. “Community voice is central to each of the selected projects, establishing and reinforcing relationships that are foundational for future research, outreach and impact.”
The projects
ARRIVALS Wilmington: Photovoice is a partnership between Jon Cox, associate professor of art and design and interim director of the Delaware Teachers Institute, Polly Zavadivker, associate professor of history and director of the Program in Jewish Studies, the Delaware Division of the Arts and Jewish Family Services. This arts-based initiative will engage the immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers living in Wilmington through visual storytelling. Participants will learn the tenets of Photovoice and cyanotype printmaking, and their art will be displayed at a public exhibition.
Julie Karand, associate professor of biomedical engineering, and her collaborators—Theresa Emmett, director of the nonprofit after school program FourYouth, and Jordan Estock, engineering faculty at Concord High School—will expose middle school students in Wilmington to the world of engineering, through hands-on design projects and mentorship from the UD chapter of Engineers Without Borders.
Adrian Pasquarella, associate professor in the School of Education and Annastasia B. Purinton, associate policy scientist at UD’s Partnership for Public Education, will partner with Absalom Jones Head Start Center in Wilmington and Smart Kidz Club—a Delaware-based multimedia and electronic book publisher—to address persistent opportunity gaps by offering high-quality, research-based ebooks and interactive read-aloud tools to families with limited access to early learning resources.
Annette Pic, policy researcher at the Delaware Institute for Excellence in Early Childhood in the College of Education and Human Development and Friendship House to create a community-informed survey that will help partners to better understand how local services targeted to support individuals and families in the Wilmington community experiencing homelessness are utilized, including barriers to stable housing and what community members perceive as necessary to locate permanent housing.
A continuation of a project started in the 2024-2025 academic year, the Community Violence Prevention Initiative is a partnership between Whitney Polk, assistant professor of Human Development and Family Sciences, and the Center for Structural Equity (CFSE), a community organization dedicated to empowering and supporting youth navigating and coping with structural violence. Mini-grant funding has supported trauma-informed community violence prevention training for CFSE staff and 10-15 Community Engagement Ambassadors (CEAs). CEAs will then each work with multiple youth in need of intensive academic and social-emotional support.