Ten tips for getting started in outreach

1) Get in touch. Funding agencies look for strong partnership with educators, and they pay attention to projects that demonstrate an understanding of federal and state standards for science education. Nancy Hutchison, who coordinates the Science Education Partnership at the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center in Seattle, says that scientists with big ideas on how to "fix" the system, without teacher input, fail.

2) Start small. Most large funding agencies won't fund a project without a proven track record. Local donors, however, are often willing to take a risk on small "feel-good" projects, says Rebecca Smith, codirector of the Science and Health Education Partnership at the University of California, San Francisco.

3) Work with what you've got. Write outreach into your grant, suggests Barbara Battelle, a research scientist at Whitney Laboratories at the University of Florida. When she decided to host minority high school students in her lab, she wrote a supplemental proposal into her existing National Science Foundation grant.

4) Get something out of it. Getting involved in community outreach shouldn't be completely altruistic, says Graham Hatfull, professor of biotechnology at the University of Pittsburgh. The high school and undergraduate students he hosts in his laboratory make real contributions to his research and share authorship in publications such as Cell.

5) Make it real. Stress responsibility and ownership in a project. A rote exercise with a planned outcome isn't likely to inspire the creative thinking required for scientific inquiry. Hatfull's Phagehunter project, for example, requires students to collect samples from the environment and then follow a series of steps to isolate a potentially novel phage. It's helpful to make the initial concepts and procedures simple, says Hatfull.

6) Let the students do the teaching. Establish student-student mentoring to make the project sustainable. Letting experienced students become the mentors reinforces what they've learned and frees you up to work on more advanced concepts and skills, says Deborah Jacobs-Sera, who is the assistant coordinator of Hatfull's Phagehunter project.

7) Plan for the long haul. Some of the most successful programs develop long-lasting relationships, providing support that extends beyond laboratory science. Leonore Reiser, who leads a minority outreach program at the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, Calif., provides career counseling and even helps find contacts for former students in college laboratories.

8) Create multiple goalposts. Laboratory projects that have multiple achievable milestones make progress more noticeable and rewarding. "If the student can only get part-way," says Hatfull, "what they have accomplished can represent an achievement and not a failure."

9) Demonstrate your success. While anecdotal evidence of increased participation in science or higher percentages of students continuing to college can be a good first step, developing quantitative measures of progress requires a customized approach. Hatfull recruited David Hanauer, an applied linguist, to the Phagehunter project in order to develop a quantitative cognitive tests and assessment tools that could track student progress accurately.

10) Getting the attention of big donors. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) donates approximately $100 million each year for science education in the United States. Peter Bruns, vice president of grants and special programs at HHMI, supports programs that share a common factor: Scientists gain as much as students and teachers. Bringing students to the lab isn't the only solution. HHMI grant recipient Nancy Moreno's program at Baylor College partners graduate students with local teachers. The teachers gain lab experience but also serve as mentors to scientists who need to sharpen their communication skills.