Proposal Review Process

Review team

Your proposal will be read by a review team, which is a mix of other farmers, extension staff, researchers, and people who work as consultants or other service providers. Normally four readers are assigned to each proposal so that differing responses and perspectives are brought to bear.

Scoring and analysis

Once the proposals have been read and assigned tentative scores, SARE staff arrange a conference call with the review team to talk about each one, exchange ideas, and look at the strengths and weaknesses of each proposal. They also go through the budget and make sure that the items in it are reasonable and consistent with what SARE will fund. After this discussion, each reviewer independently submits a final score.

These scores, from 0 to 5, are added up, divided by the number of reviewers, and a final score arrived at. Projects are then ranked by score, and all projects and scores, along with recommendations for funding, are presented to the Northeast SARE Administrative Council.

Final funding decisions

This council-the SARE governing body-makes the final decisions on which projects to fund, although this group relies heavily on reviewers, their scores, and their recommendations. During the selection process they may respond to reviewer feedback by allowing performance and budget amendments to proposals that are conceptually sound but have minor implementation flaws.

Project funding

In general, about $180,000 to $200,000 is used for Farmer Grants, and anywhere from 20 to perhaps 35 projects are funded each year.