Many university faculty writing grants need stakeholders to work with on projects to satisfy NSF Broader Impacts requirements, but those partnerships are difficult to build on short timelines. Many community-based stakeholders want to work on environmental sustainability issues, but they  are at or over capacity, leaving the process of formulating partnerships on sustainability issues difficult. The EPIC Model seeks to remedy this by partnering universities with communities to address community-identified projects through existing student coursework, and those relationships can be leveraged to be included in Broader Impacts proposals.In this session, EPIC-N staff will share documented best practices based on research literature and experiences from fieldwork for identifying community partners and building trust-based, impactful university partnerships. Participants will receive a variety of practical resources, including templates for engaging partners, sample memorandums of understanding, appropriate scopes of work for faculty and students, objectives, and work plans for projects, and more.