In her 31^st year of leading Advanced Technological (ATE) initiatives, Elaine L. Craft is stepping back—a bit.  

Elaine Craft served as Mentor-Connect’s principal investigator for 12 years.

A chemical engineer in her first career, Craft led the South Carolina Advanced Technological Educational Education Center of Excellence—one of the earliest ATE centers funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF)—midway through her second career as a community college educator.

In 2012 Craft became the principal investigator of Mentor-Connect: Leadership Development and Outreach for ATE,  an ATE project that is a partnership between the South Carolina Advanced Technological Education Center at Florence-Darlington Technical College and the American Association of Community Colleges.  

As the principal investigator (PI) for three Mentor-Connect project grants, Craft encouraged community college educators from across the United States to pursue their ideas for improving technician education.   

The mentoring system, which Craft developed and refined with a stellar group of successful Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program principal investigators, has assisted more than 500 people on faculty-led teams from more than 400 two-year colleges as they learned how to prepare competitive grant proposals. David M. Hata, Mentor-Connect’s evaluator reported in the Journal of Advanced Technological Education in 2024 that out of 164 New-to-ATE proposals submitted by colleges that participated in Mentor-Connect’s first 10 cohorts, 117 were funded for a success rate of 71%.

During a recent interview via Zoom, Craft expressed pride that Mentor-Connect had reached this “mountaintop.” Last fall she took this pinnacle to transition to co-principal investigator. This September, Craft will shift to senior personnel, which means she will continue to be involved in Mentor-Connect, but not in charge of it.

Craft decided last year to reduce her workload to spend more time with her new husband, Dr. Daniel Hartley. “When I do something, I like to give it up my all. I tend to give 110% of whatever it is I do,” she said, adding, “He deserves that 110%.”

Favorite ATE Experience

Asked to recall a favorite ATE memory or experience, Craft said, “One of the things that warms my heart the most is seeing people at the PI Conference or at HI-TEC that wouldn't have been there if we had not done what we did, you know, if the Mentor-Connect project had not come into being...

“And I knew that that providing that kind of support is just critical for two-year colleges because they, for the most part, do not have a culture of grants. There's no expectation that [community college] faculty will do grants. They get little reward and often they get pushback ... because in two-year colleges, you're hired to teach.”

Craft thinks the ATE program overall and Mentor-Connect’s focus on assisting faculty from institutions that had previously not had ATE grants—particularly small and rural community colleges—has helped to change those attitudes.

Mentor-Connect leaders Elaine Craft (left), Pamela Silvers (center), and Emery DeWitt received HI-TEC’s Innovative Program Award in 2024. 

Mentor-Connect has evolved over the years in response to what its team has learned and the ATE program’s changing needs. It now provides mentoring to faculty who have not had ATE grants even if their colleges have previously received NSF funding. Other Mentor-Connect services include Second-Chance Mentoring to help faculty rework and resubmit ATE proposals that have been declined for funding; Moving-Up Mentoring to assist faculty who have had successful small ATE grants prepare larger grant proposals; Co-Mentoring that combines discipline-specific guidance from ATE centers and technical expertise from Mentor-Connect; and, PI 101  that provides guidance and support for new principal investigators and their team members through the first year of project implementation.

Mentor-Connect has also cultivated its corps of mentors through the Mentor Fellows Internship  for people who have had three to five years experience in the ATE program and want to contribute by serving as Mentor-Connect mentors.

Mentoring before Mentor-Connect   

When the ATE program ramped up in the 1990s Craft and the other ATE center principal investigators routinely fielded questions about how to get started in the program, which began with the passage of the Scientific and Advanced Technology Act in October 1992.  

By the mid-2000s, Craft’s development of an engineering technology curriculum that used problem-based, just-in-time instruction at South Carolina’s two-year public colleges led to her providing more informal advising to ATE colleagues, presenting grant-writing workshops for ATE and Department of Labor, and troubleshooting at the behest of NSF program directors.

“I'm sort of a systems thinker,” Craft said, explaining that her ideas for Mentor-Connect “bubbled up from these other experiences.” She and other ATE principal investigators who collaborated on the Mentor-Connect proposal wanted to address the void left by NSF’s elimination of the preliminary ATE proposal review process. They also wanted to involve more community colleges in the ATE program. At that time, only about a third of the nation’s two-year colleges had received an ATE grant. Now more than half of the nation’s two-year public colleges have received ATE grants, according to NSF.  

Working with Mentees

Craft, who often uses analogies when she speaks, likened working with Mentor-Connect mentees to her experience teaching math to the “serious” adults enrolled in evening classes at Northeastern Technical College in the 1970s. 

Elaine Craft talks with mentees during the mock panel review at the Mentor-Connect's winter workshop in 2019.

“They might not have had academic success in the past, but they wanted [the degree], they were hungry for it. And I was willing to do anything that I could do to help them be successful,” Craft said, explaining that she gets the same fulfillment helping Mentor-Connect mentees.

“It's the same experience as teaching when the light bulb comes on. They get it. They see it ... They want it [ATE funding] for their students and their colleges,” she said.

Pivotal Moments

Her son and twin daughters were toddlers when Craft agreed to teach one course at Northeastern Technical College in Cheraw, South Carolina, the small town where she and her first husband, Fred, moved in the early 1970s for his job. Within a few years she was working full time at the college and taking courses at the University of South Carolina for her master’s degree of business administration.

In the 1960s Craft earned her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Mississippi. She was the only woman in most of her engineering courses at Ole Miss and became the first female member of Tau Beta PI, the college’s chapter of a national honorary engineering fraternity.

As a graduate student 10 years later it was challenging to manage parental responsibilities, teaching, and graduate course work even with a “wonderful husband” and childcare help. That experience, she said, made her more empathetic with her students and Mentor-Connect participants. (Many people in the ATE community knew Craft’s first husband, Fred. Elaine and Fred Craft had been married for 48 years when he died in 2020.)

Craft considers her agreement to teach at the community college one the pivotal moments of her life because there was not another opening in the small college’s math department for 10 years. Her innovative work at Northeastern Technical College put her on the team that developed the South Carolina Technical College’s System’s first ATE grant proposals.

For many mentees, Mentor-Connect is a pivotal experience for them, their students, and their communities, according to the testimonials posted on Mentor-Connect’s website and the data that Hata has gathered and reported.

Doug Laven, a mechatronics instructor at South Central College and principal investigator of three ATE grants whose first involvement in Mentor-Connect was as a Mentor Fellow, explained Craft’s legacy through Mentor-Connect this way: “Mentorship is about making positive changes in others’ lives. I have experienced firsthand the influence Elaine has had on Mentor-Connect’s success and growth. She has created a culture that helps others navigate challenges with clarity and confidence. Her contribution to the ATE community is hard to measure when hearing all the success stories from those she has influenced as the PI of Mentor-Connect.

“The guidance and support Elaine as provided to me, has been a pivotal part of my ATE NSF journey. I have grown both personally and professionally and take every opportunity to share what I have learned from her to inspire others to achieve their goals.” Laven is now a Mentor-Connect mentor. 

Ingredients for Competitive ATE Proposals  

Asked if she can predict which proposals will be funded, Craft said that Mentor-Connect’s “fabulous mentors” have worked with teams to ensure proposals are logical, beautifully written, and with all the right components.

“The things that used to be bad about proposals are gone,” she said. But she noted that a well composed proposal is not the same as a competitive proposal.

Like a good cake recipe, Craft said, a competitive proposal depends on how the quality ingredients are put together.

For ATE proposals, Craft said, the key ingredient is faculty—not a grant writer—describing in detail how their innovative ideas to help students gain advanced technology skills and knowledge will be carried out:  “When I talk about being real, it means that you've got to be very clear about how you are going to do what it is you say you're going to do. I tell our groups all the time that ATE does not believe in miracles ... So you can't just say that this miraculous stuff is going to happen. You've got to tell them exactly how you're going to make that happen. And I mean, down to who's going to do it, who's going to do what and when.”

Craft also emphasized that the primary motivation for faculty has to be improving their programs to benefit students, not the grant money.

“I tell people all the time, if all you're doing is going after grant money, don't waste your energy. You've got to want to do what that project is going to do. The money is just a tool for helping make it happen. But if you start with your eye on the money first and then kind of come up with a project that'll help you get that money,  it just doesn't work,” she said.

Effective Project Execution

Whether principal investigators will be successful carrying out their ideas is even harder to predict because so much depends on the support of other people on their campuses.

Craft describes starting an ATE project as similar to starting a small business. People and things need to be organized, items purchased, reports filed, all while the principal investigator is teaching and fulfilling other duties on campus.

“That's why it's important that the college be supportive, because these faculty don't come to this job with expertise in these other areas that are essential,” Craft said.

The high turnover of college administrators, faculty, and staff since the early days of the Covid pandemic have added to novice ATE principal investigators’ challenges.

That is why Mentor-Connect began offering PI 101 in 2023 with Pamela Silvers, now Mentor-Connect’s principal investigator, providing the guidance to first-time ATE grantees via periodic virtual group meetings and in-person meetings at the PI Conference.

“It's a yeoman's job with holding the hands of these faculty through that first year. And if they're not getting the support at their college, or maybe the college is supportive, but they don't know what they need to do to support the faculty, she helps them learn how to ask [for help],” Craft said of Silvers’s work on this aspect of Mentor-Connect.

Last week Silvers recounted that she met Craft in 2012 while writing her first ATE grant proposal. Craft answered her questions then and encouraged her subsequent grant applications.

“She is one of the most knowledgeable and supportive people I have ever known....Elaine not only walks the walk but talks the talk. One of her most remarkable qualities is her humility—she answers questions, helps others succeed, and makes it all look seamless.

“In recent years, as I became more involved in the Mentor-Connect project, Elaine has served as a mentor to me, offering guidance and showing through her actions what it means to be a leader. She has a unique way of answering questions that makes you feel good about asking them, never making you feel like you shouldn’t have asked in the first place.”

PI 101 received the Innovative Program Award at the HI-TEC 2024 Conference. The award recognized the team led by Silvers, then a Mentor-Connect co-principal investigator, for developing and implementing “a significant innovation, which has led to a positive impact on student enrollment, retention, and/or advanced technological education.”

PI 101 is the latest addition to Mentor-Connect’s regenerative process for leadership development among ATE’s principal investigators, who are mostly community college educators. 

“If you can keep them in the system so that they can keep their momentum going and get another grant and another grant to keep building ... It's going to be an ecosystem,” Craft said.