Turlock mayor Gary Soiseth, promised to donate his mayoral stipend to fund public policy research at Stanislaus State while running for mayor. Soiseth’s campaign promise is coming true with the newly created Public Policy Award (“Mayor’s Award”). 
This award will be supported from a fund that will sustain a public policy competition between students of Stanislaus State. This fund will stem from Soiseth’s mayoral stipend.
“While the Mayor’s Award honors my campaign promise, it is more than that,” Soiseth told the Turlock Journal. “It shows that I want to find real solutions to social, civic and economic issues that challenge our community, and I believe the solutions will be found among Stanislaus State students.”
Stanislaus State and the City of Turlock Mary Gary Soiseth’s Office invite research proposals from undergraduate and graduate students currently enrolled at Stanislaus State.
The subject matter of the research must address issues of serious importance to the region, rising to the level of public concern. 
Students will compete for the Mayor’s Award in a two-stage process. The first stage is identifying a serious and pressing public policy issue facing local communities in our region, designing a research project to help community leaders understand and addressing key facets of the problem.
The second stage is developing and conducting the research project to investigate the issue in depth, conducting an analysis of your research findings and recommending a public policy solution to address the issue.
Research proposal review will be a competitive process and the winning proposal will receive the funding to assist in the implementation of the proposed research.
A committee of faculty and staff will screen the proposals, and a committee including Soiseth, faculty and community leaders will review the proposals.
Stephen Routh, chair of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, will oversee the award. Proposals should be submitted to Routh by Oct. 30.
For more information, contact Stephen Routh, Department of Political Science and Administration, at: [email protected].