Lilly Endowment Funds New Programs from Community-Engaged Alliance
Community-Engaged Alliance (CEA) is thrilled to announce that Lilly Endowment Inc. is supporting our new efforts focusing on the intersection of civic health and public trust. A $936,573 Lilly Endowment grant will fund several new programs and initiatives that highlight the importance and interconnectedness of student learning, civic health, and public trust. Each pillar of the project is designed to strengthen Indiana’s civic engagement, improve public trust in higher education, and foster collaboration between educational institutions and their communities.
What’s Funded?
The grant will enable CEA to introduce and continue a variety of programs and initiatives over the coming years. Here’s a glimpse into the work ahead:
High-Impact Education Practices (HIPs)
CEA is expanding its focus to support a wider range of HIPs that are correlated with enhancements in both academic and civic engagement outcomes. These HIPs will connect community engagement with classroom learning and broader collegiate experience which will foster a new generation of civic-minded students and graduates. This expansion moves beyond traditional service-learning to include diverse practices such as Learning communities, common intellectual experiences, learning about global and diverse perspectives, first-year experiences, research with faculty, and capstone projects.
Faculty and Staff Professional Development
Professional development is a crucial element of this proposal. CEA recognizes that the ways in which faculty, staff, and students prefer to engage in professional development have changed, which is why we’re continuing our popular Spreading the Word Speaker Series. This program will continue to bring you engaging presentations on K-12 partnerships, service learning, civil discourse, and more. Better still, this program can be used for in-person or virtual presentations and will remain free to our member campuses!
Additionally, we’re proud to introduce a series of regional workshops that will be tailored to catalyze a deeper understanding of the unique assets and challenges associated with community-engaged work in your region. These workshops will empower educators create interinstitutional partnerships, fuse more durable relationships with community partners in their area, ideate about how to capture community-identified problems and collaborate on strategies to leverage the resources available to solve these problems.
Civic Engagement Assessment Model
CEA is in the process of developing a toolkit for campuses to assess their civic engagement, including a proprietary tool being developed in partnership with the Center for Postsecondary Research, that will provide insights from faculty, students, and their communities. This will give campuses a way to view their work and its impact wholistically. This toolkit and instructional information on how to use it will be offered to all member campuses at no cost. Once these toolkits have been applied by campuses, their results as well as data sets from other sources will be shared with a CEA Scholar in Residence who will create a report on the state of civic engagement across college campuses in Indiana.
Curricular Innovation
CEA will lead faculty innovation workshops to provide faculty with the skills and knowledge necessary to implement new curricula and pedagogical techniques that encourage civic mindedness in their students. Faculty will receive training to intentionally engage students in the classroom so that students become more confident in their ability to make a difference in the classroom and in their communities. Courses redesigned through these workshops will urge students to grapple with how their classroom learning could translate into real-world action.
New Funded Programs
The first of three newly funded programs is the Scholar-Practitioner program. This program will provide faculty, staff, students, and community members with the support and funding they need to adequately research and address a community-identified issue. We are excited to see the partnerships created, the actionable solutions implemented, and the learning outcomes achieved through this program. Recipients of this funded program will also participate in a learning community where they can celebrate achievements, share challenges, and get feedback on ideas to make their projects as successful as possible.
The second newly funded program is the Faculty Fellows Idea Lab. This program will build on one of CEA’s cornerstone programs with a new creative spin. Over the course of 12 months, Faculty members in this cohort-style program will be encouraged to utilize blue-sky thinking to generate ideas to address the question: How might we generate more civic-minded graduates in Indiana? Next, they will engage with experts in the field and test their idea(s) before creating a research brief.
The final newly funded program is another twist on a previously very popular CEA grant: Community Engagement Using HIPs. This program gives faculty, staff, administrators, and even graduate students the opportunity center community- engagement into their students’ collegiate experience by integrating one or more high-impact practices into either a curricular or co-curricular project. CEA believes this program has the potential to launch a variety of innovative projects, given the variety of HIPs included in this program, the breadth of talent at CEA member institutions, and the amazing community partners that exist around the state. Similar to the Scholar-Practitioner program, recipients of this funded program will also be placed into a learning community where they can get peer-to-peer project support and build social capital with likeminded individuals from across Indiana.
A Vision for Indiana’s Civic Future
At the heart of these initiatives is a shared goal: to make Indiana a national leader in civic engagement and higher education-community collaboration. With the support of Lilly Endowment, CEA is ready to expand its reach, innovate its programming, and create a lasting impact on both campuses and communities across the state.
Stay tuned for more updates as we begin rolling out these exciting new programs!
About Lilly Endowment
Lilly Endowment Inc. is an Indianapolis-based private foundation created in 1937 by J. K. Lilly and his sons, Eli and J.K. Jr., through gifts of stock in their pharmaceutical business, Eli Lilly and Company. While those gifts remain the financial bedrock of the Endowment, the Endowment is a separate entity from the company, with a distinct governing board, staff and location. In keeping with its founders’ wishes, the Endowment supports the causes of community development, education and religion. The Endowment funds programs throughout the United States, especially in the field of religion, and maintains a special commitment to its founders’ hometown, Indianapolis, and home state, Indiana.