Geneva College was recently awarded $118,000 for a three-year Institutional Impact Grant through the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University. Geneva was selected alongside 28 projects among 33 colleges and universities across the country who were awarded this grant. The funding was awarded to the Coherence & Envision Co-Curricular Program, led by Chair of the Core Studies Department Jeff Cole, Calling & Career Center Director Krista Autrey, and VP and Dean of Student Development Jamie Swank.
The grant will allow the College to continue three new co-curricular student programs: the Coherence Sophomore Retreat, Coherence+ Summer Fellows Program, and the Envision Project. These programs are part of a four-year co-curricular program that complements Geneva’s Core Curriculum.
The Coherence Sophomore Retreat is an immersive weekend experience for second year students that focuses on guiding students in identifying and understanding their own life values and what it looks like to work towards the implementation of those values in living a coherent life. Students are invited to consider what it means to “know the world and still love it,” as alumnus Steven Garber, PhD, illustrates in his book, Visions of Vocation. This program is designed to lay the groundwork for the next part of the co-curricular program, the Coherence+ Fellows Summer Program.
Coherence+ is a summer program for 10 student leaders entering their junior or senior year. The program is built out of the College’s Core Studies program and is intended to be a deeper exploration into the content of the two-day Coherence Retreat. The program focuses on the following eight themes:
Wisdom | Beauty | Culture Making | Work & Rest | Love, Mutuality & Interdependency | Empathy, Otherness & Created Diversity | Justice | Power
The 10 students engage in rigorous character development through academic and experiential learning, 1-on-1 mentorship, intentional relational development, citizenship experiences, and on-campus work. The program begins with a weekend retreat on spiritual disciplines and ends with a weekend trip to Washington D.C. where students engage in conversations on justice and power, to cap off their summer learning experience.
The Envision Project builds off the character development of the previous two programs by inviting third-year students to put their character development into action by challenging them to consider how they might develop solutions toward profound local problems through their field of study. They are invited to understand the complexities of communities and how a “good decision” for one group of people may not always be a “good decision” for another group of people in the same community. They are led by community members to understand a “profound local problem” from as many sides as possible before developing their solutions to the problem in cross-disciplinary groups and presenting their solutions to these problems to their peers, Geneva faculty and staff, and community leaders.
About the Program for Leadership and Character and the ECI
The mission of the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University is to inspire, educate, and empower leaders of character to serve humanity. Through innovative teaching, creative programming, and cutting-edge research, we aim to transform the lives of students, foster an inclusive culture of leadership and character, and catalyze a broader public conversation that places character at the center of leadership.
The Educating Character Initiative aims to support a wider community of individuals and institutions to educate character within colleges and universities. Through the creation of a network of interested institutions and educators, the development and dissemination of research and resources, the organization of conferences and convenings, and the direct awarding of grants to individuals and institutions interested in advancing this work in their own contexts, we aspire to nurture a creative, compassionate, and collaborative community of educators who can learn from each other as partners in character education. The ECI is funded by a generous grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
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