Bridging rural & urban STEM professionals across KY // Intercultural Microgrant Guest Blog
The following guest blog is from 2024 Intercultural Microgrant (Civic Health) recipients Deborah Slone and Sandi Curd. Learn more about this project at kyrux.org/microgrants/2024.
The KY Rural-Urban STEM Champions Summit was founded with the goal of bridging the gap between STEM educators, industry professionals, and advocates across both rural and urban communities in Kentucky.
Recognizing the need for collaboration, shared resources, and sustainable engagement, our planning team set out to create a space where STEM providers could connect, exchange best practices, and build a peer-driven support network.
The idea for this summit emerged from a core group of women STEM leaders who discovered that some of Kentucky’s premier STEM experiential learning centers were not connected to one another. These women initially came together with a simple but powerful idea: to visit each other’s facilities and learn from one another’s approaches. What started as a few informal learning visits quickly revealed a larger need for a structured, statewide effort to bridge the gaps between rural and urban STEM initiatives. This realization fueled the vision for a formal summit, bringing together stakeholders from across Kentucky to foster greater collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and long-term partnerships.
Kentucky’s STEM ecosystem is diverse, with institutions, organizations, and educators working toward common goals—but often in isolated efforts. Rural educators may lack access to industry partnerships, while urban programs may struggle with outreach beyond their immediate networks. By bringing together STEM champions from across these landscapes, we aimed to create a statewide movement that fosters inclusivity, innovation, and long-term collaboration.
Learn more about the summit below!
Summit Program
—Deborah Slone & Sandi Curd
The Kentucky Intercultural Microgrant Program is a seed grant to support two or more individuals or organizations collaborating across distance, difference, or sector on projects that celebrate and connect Kentucky's people and places.
Launched with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, Kentucky Waterways Alliance, Fund for the Arts, the Monument Workshop at UK, the Josh May Memorial Fund, and individual donors, the 2024 Microgrant Program invests in a series of seed grants (awards from $250-2000) to support short-term projects that foster dialogue, connection, or collaboration among Kentuckians from disparate backgrounds, identities, or experiences. Projects that involve diverse partners and invite the public to participate are preferred.