eeBLUE Aquaculture Literacy Mini-Grant Program Results

The eeBLUE program began in 2020 as an effort to better connect National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) offices and programs with each other, environmental educators, and aquaculture industry members to improve public knowledge about aquaculture. The program set an objective to establish cross-sectoral partnerships that could bring aquaculture to more Americans, particularly those who lack the resources to learn about or develop aquaculture programs.

Click on the map to the right to find the locations of grantee projects.

The eeBLUE program hoped to develop creative approaches for engagement that would bolster aquaculture literacy across the country.

Grantees of the eeBLUE Aquaculture Literacy mini-grant program built diverse, collaborative networks in ten communities across the United States, advancing aquaculture literacy and building power to advocate for aquaculture from coast to coast. Grantees developed programs that are replicable, sustainable, and positioned for lasting impact thanks to the community connections they relied on to develop and sustain their work.

Grantees of the eeBLUE Aquaculture Literacy mini-grant program built diverse, collaborative networks in ten communities across the United States, advancing aquaculture literacy and building power to advocate for aquaculture from coast to coast.

This evaluation found that eeBLUE Grantees’ reported outcomes extended beyond aquaculture literacy to broader outcomes. Grantees developed markets, jobs, and sustainable partnerships that will extend far into the future, helping to bring about the long-term outcomes that the eeBLUE program seeks. Through the eeBLUE program, grantees were able to expand their organizational capacity, and plant seeds for future work. The information reported by grantees demonstrates that strong partnerships and flexibility over implementation strategies can overcome challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, staff turnover, and even weather. We recommend additional methods for exploring results in the next funding round.

Grantees succeeded in reaching the most individuals when they had strategic partnerships in place or were able to establish strategic partnerships. Grantees reported on both the breadth and depth of aquaculture literacy success. One grantee reported reaching over 300,000 individuals with an exhibit that led groups of school students to return with their parents in-tow. Another reported that partners appeared to help them rescue abalone when severe weather threatened the farm. The results reported by grantees show the power of small-scale grant-making. Small amounts of funding go to small, existing, community networks that already have the grassroots connections that lead to success. In addition, grantees highlighted the importance of being flexible and responsive in meeting partners where they are at. The flexibility of a small program helps to create that space. 

Duplicating this successful project model may mean considering which partners are needed for success and seeking to develop these strategic partnerships in advance of implementing a literacy strategy. For example, existing relationships with schools and aquaria enabled multiple grantees to begin providing aquaculture information quickly. As a result, grantees achieved ripple effects that reached hundreds of thousands of people. Collectively, eeBLUE grantees and community partners built on broad and deep community connections to bring aquaculture into the lives of almost 350,000 people between July 2021 and December 2022. We recommend expanding on network analyses and continuing to emphasize broad partnerships in subsequent funding rounds.

Across the program, the ten grantees reported partnering with 53 additional organizations, including universities, aquaria, restaurants, schools, industry professionals, and industry organizations. Four grantees shared partners or were listed as partners to each other on separate projects. The number of partners ranged from 2 to 14. Most commonly, grantees worked with four or five partners.

“Bigger picture, we now have a great working relationship and have been and will continue to learn from each other regarding all aspects of … aquaculture since we have different skill sets, facilities, knowledge, goals etc..” Anonymous Grantee Partner

Strategic partnerships also benefitted grantees by the depth of their relationships.

Partners became invested in each other’s work and lives in meaningful ways. One grantee reported that partners volunteered to help them rescue abalone when severe weather threatened the farm. A grantee partner noted that through their eeBLUE partnership, they have identified additional ways to collaborate that make use of the partners’ unique strengths. All grantees reported future plans for continuing work, and some of our grantee partner survey respondents validated that the networks developed through this program have had a ripple effect and will continue to grow.

Click into the Logic Model below to explore how the eeBLUE team works with its partners to improve aquaculture literacy across the U.S. in service of providing people with healthy, delicious, sustainable food options. You can use your mouse to zoom in and pan around this document to see the inputs, activities, outputs, interim results, outcomes, and impacts that eeBLUE and its grantees are working to achieve.

The eeBLUE Aquaculture Literacy Mini-grants program created the results describe above over the course of a one and a half-year grant implementation period. The timeline below shows the approximate dates for major milestones.

1. Refine the Grantee Final Report Form. Reducing the reporting burden on grantees allows them more time to focus on grant activities, but additional grantee reporting questions would improve the self-reports for future funding rounds. We recommend two additional questions at this time: 

• Ask grantees to estimate what would not have been possible without the eeBLUE grant funds. 

• Ask the grantees to estimate the number of people reached with a bit more specificity. For example, the bottom range in the current grantee report includes the number zero, and two categories include the number 100, which complicates grantee response clarity and therefore estimating grantee reach. 

2. Consider developing an online Grantee Forum for interaction and sharing expertise. During the symposium, grantees recommended a mid-grant meeting like the symposium where they could discuss challenges and find ways to pivot their work. This would also provide them with more opportunities to build relationships across grant projects.

3. In future funding cycles, reemphasize the diversity of partnerships that leads to success. The eeBLUE request for proposals asked applicants to bring together partners across the private and educational sectors. This recipe led to powerful and efficient partnerships. Grantees recommended to future grantees that they broaden their partnerships even further across sectors. While we did not collect evidence showing that results expand as partnerships expand, we do believe that reemphasizing broad, cross-sectoral partnerships will allow the eeBLUE program to continue to see powerful results like those demonstrated by these grantees. 

4. Maintain the low-burden application and reporting structure in place. Research shows that the capacity for responding to grant programs can serve as the key factor limiting access to funds for developing programs, especially for community organizations. We believe that the low-burden approach to the eeBLUE Aquaculture Literacy Mini-grant Program enabled NOAA and NAAEE to identify grantees who had the essential components for success—community partnerships—while not excluding them for lack of administrative capacity to respond to complicated application processes. 

5. Maintain grant program flexibility. While we all hope that the COVID-19 Pandemic does not return in coming years, other factors affect small organizations in ways that could limit their ability to complete projects. Smaller organizations with smaller staffs may be severely limited if a single staff person leaves or changes. We recommend continuing to build flexibility into this grant program so that future grantees can pivot when needed. We found that almost all the ten grantees reviewed in this cycle required a pivot to a new or adapted strategy, and yet almost all of the grantees achieved significant aquaculture literacy results. 

6. Build in additional time for evaluative sense-making with grantees. Our evaluation team recommends building in an additional hour or more for grantee feedback to the future evaluation team. We found the hour spent with grantees yielded valuable feedback, and we recommend expanding on that time to explore additional topics in the future. 

7. Continue to build on the network mapping exercise. Network mapping is a tool that grows more powerful over time. We recommend adding to the network map created through this evaluation to identify how round one grantees are linked with grantees in subsequent rounds and to identify ways the eeBLUE program can expand its reach through its expanding network. 

Section TBD by eeBLUE team.

The eeBLUE Aquaculture Literacy Mini-grant Program sought to reduce the reporting burden it placed in grantees. As a result, the program required grantees to report on their progress in a google form at two points during the grant period: in January 2022 and January 2023. Our evaluation of this grant program relied on these two self-reported sources for primary information about grantee activities, partners, and results. We conducted basic textual analysis of qualitative responses and assessed quantitative information provided in the reports. The reports asked for details on project reach to communities, but due to the categories provided, the evaluation team was not able to draw specific conclusions regarding reach. 

We conducted a listening and recommendation session with nine of the ten grantees during a virtual February 2023 close-out symposium. During this time, we asked grantees to reflect on their experience using the question, “As you think about your community engagement work, what lessons learned and recommendations do you have?” We asked them to respond in three categories: (1) Recommendations for eeBLUE team/future grant cycles; (2) Recommendations for colleagues working to build aquaculture literacy; and (3) Other lessons learned or recommendations. The February symposium also included presentations by all ten grantees, which served as additional data sources for the evaluation team. Grantee presentations provided additional details on results, partnerships, and lessons learned. The evaluation team integrated these reports and additional recommendations into our observations. 

We worked with eeBLUE personnel to draft and finalize a logic model describing how the grant program intends to improve aquaculture literacy, and how aquaculture literacy will lead to additional outcomes. This process enabled the evaluation team to understand the intent and activities of the program in the context of the grant-making endeavor and helped us identify key outcomes of interest to the eeBLUE program and its funders. The program logic model appears as  Appendix B .

The evaluation team developed a basic network map to demonstrate how grantees and their partners expanded the known eeBLUE network through their relationships. We used grantee reports, symposium presentations, and additional information from eeBLUE personnel to expand and refine the map.

Finally, the evaluation team conducted an anonymous survey of grantee partners as a method for providing basic validation that reported partnerships existed. With assistance from NOAA personnel, the survey received OMB clearance for issuance. We sought partner information from grantees based on their final reports and additional information provided by eeBLUE personnel, and emailed survey invitations to 35 potential partners. We received 11 responses for a response rate of 33 percent. The responses are not generalizable across grantees, but they provided additional information about partnerships that existed during the program. 

Our evaluation of the eeBLUE mini-grant program worked within time and data collection constraints. However, these constraints did not present an unsurmountable limitation for the evaluation. GeoLiteracy verifies that the data collected and analyzed for this evaluation represents a fair, fulsome, and accurate picture of the grant program’s operations and outcomes. Where we identified challenges with data triangulation, we have noted that in the text and explained any alternative perspectives of concern.

The constraints of this evaluation did not allow for separating grantees’ eeBLUE mini-grant-funded activities from activities funded by additional sources. As a result, our evaluation demonstrates how eeBLUE funds contributed to results, but cannot show that results can be attributed solely to eeBLUE program funds. This evaluation also primarily used grantee-reported results collected through a Google form provided by eeBLUE personnel. We identified a few limitations to the form, which we describe in the recommendations. One limitation that presents a challenge for this evaluation is that the Google form does not ask grantees what they may have accomplished in the absence of their eeBLUE grant funds. As such, the evaluation findings summarize how grantee projects succeeded in general, during the time when they were monitoring their work for the eeBLUE Aquaculture Literacy Mini-grant Program. Where possible, the evaluation team triangulated information using external sources, like media reports and social media posts, to validate grantee-reported information.