For many STEM organizations and projects, the funding landscape has shifted dramatically over the past couple of years. Collectively, we’re grappling with changes in the stability and longevity of grants and funding organizations, as well as the widespread adoption of AI and what that means for how research and community engagement are carried out, and more broadly the impacts this has on the STEM workforce.
Some background on CSCCE’s financial sustainability model
At CSCCE, we too are feeling the impact of these changes. As a service organization we are downstream of any ecosystem-level shifts in funding. We’re hearing of frozen or decreased professional development budgets for community professionals in some organizations, and layoffs and reorgs in others. Part of our strategy for weathering the storm has been to lean into our mixed revenue model – slightly shifting what services we’re delivering based on where there is most funding – while staying aligned with our mission.
CSCCE’s financial sustainability model draws upon three broad revenue streams that often work together in complementary ways. Our first stream is the delivery of general registration trainings – mini-workshops and multi-week courses, as well as our Community Manager Certification Program. Our second stream involves engaging with clients as consultants or subawardees to deliver strategic consultancy, program design, and private trainings. And our third stream has helped us to bridge any shortfall via grants to develop new programs and services. Outputs from streams 2 and 3 often end up as new products and services that we can deliver in stream 1 – creating a positive engine for the continued development of relevant services. Staffing to support our community of practice is sustained by any excess revenue generated across streams 1 and 2 (or by specific projects funded through stream 3).
How things have changed in 2026
We’ve seen changes in all three of those streams this year and this has shifted some of the services that we’re providing. In particular, we’re making the most of our modular curriculum, leaning into the flexibility that we have to mix and match individual components into different configurations to meet the needs of a range of groups who have requested private trainings.
In 2026, we will have delivered more private cohorts of our online training courses and Mini-workshops than ever before. Currently, our Project Management for Scientists Bootcamp is an incredibly popular private training – we’ve delivered that course multiple times this year to over-capacity groups, with some choosing to also add on a couple of related CSCCE Mini-workshops (e.g., Designing for effective decision making during virtual meetings).
We also developed a new Introduction to Community Engagement mini-course this year, which provides an overview of the CSCCE Community Participation Model and actionable tools and tactics to put core learnings into practice, while also facilitating cross-project connections that serve to strengthen ongoing institutional knowledge sharing. The 5-session training has particularly resonated with program managers who didn’t previously see themselves as community managers – and therefore wouldn’t necessarily commit to a more in depth training like Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (also a popular private training option!).
Looking ahead to 2027
With this shift in where we’re seeing demand, we’ve been making some updates to the consultancy pages of our website, and we’re ready to start lining things up for 2027! We’ve summarized these updates in the post below, but please do click through to the new pages for more details, and/or reach out to training@cscce.org to discuss working together next year!
Private training courses and Mini-workshops
CSCCE’s training curriculum is built in a modular fashion, making it easy to choose elements that meet your needs.
Multi-week courses
Our highly interactive and practical, multi-week, online training courses contextualize and synthesize decades of research spanning organizational theory to marketing – all while honoring the wisdom that comes from practice and the value of peer support. In other words, private training cohorts not only deliver valuable learnings: Participants also benefit from our unique approach to building community while a course is in session.
Mini-workshops
CSCCE Mini-workshops are 90- to 120-minute sessions that introduce discrete ideas in community management or go deeper on a core framework. Some Mini-workshops can be clustered thematically if you are interested in a specific area of community management, and several of our workshops are also ideal if you are hosting a champions program and wish to include some training for your champions.
CSCCE courses and Mini-workshops are deliberately designed to be synchronous trainings – we do not record live sessions to protect learner privacy, with live activities designed to surface learner questions, expertise, and personal context.
Included in your private training
When you work with us on a private training, you’re not just hiring “guest lecturers”! We also include all of the technical and human infrastructure needed to tell your audience about the training, welcome them into the CSCCE learning community, and support them while they participate.
Champions programs
Community champions programs, in which participants may alternatively be referred to as ambassadors or fellows, are often the key to successfully empowering emergent leaders in a community. We offer several services to clients who want support with their champions programs. These include: program design, training sessions for champions, the creation of program infrastructure such as playbooks, and program evaluation.
Community and team culture
Our consultancy offerings around team culture focus on guiding you towards finding a solution that works, rather than prescribing next steps. While we as a team have decades of experience in community building, what works brilliantly for one team may only have small impacts on another. We have helped a number of organizations define their core values, conduct member research to inform engagement strategies, and discuss conflict and team-building.
Additional services
We also offer our services to clients who are looking to build, deploy, or socialize new technology platforms for their community, and can support meeting planning and facilitation (e.g., as part of a new community champions program or annual community gathering).
How to work with us
If you’re interested in working with CSCCE in 2027, now is the time to reach out and schedule an initial consultation. We are a US-based nonprofit organization, and as such can work with you on a fee-for-service basis or be written into your next grant proposal. If you don’t see what you’re looking for in the information shared above, you can still get in touch with us to see if we can partner on creating something new! All inquiries can be directed to training@cscce.org.