Growing Spit for Science, COBE, and the associated translational activities is admittedly a labor of love. Running a community-engaged project that involves a large non-traditional and diverse collaborative team requires a tremendous amount of work on the part of many people. The project necessitates coordination and support from multiple divisions across the university (e.g., to obtain e-mail addresses for incoming students; to secure a large central space for data collection; to distribute t-shirts to all residence hall advisors and door tags for all freshman residence hall rooms; etc.). Accordingly, strong commitment from senior leadership, and a key champion at the highest level of the university (in our case, the Provost) was critical in initially obtaining support from so many university divisions. We were met with some resistance from key leaders of various divisions at the university, as there was concern that the project would benefit the researchers at the expense of using the students as “guinea pigs”; there was concern that we would collect our data and disappear back into our labs. Accordingly, demonstrating our commitment to the students, to
