Ģý has been awarded a $50,000 capacity-building grant through the Educating Character Initiative (ECI), a project of the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University. The grant will support the College’s ongoing work to strengthen belonging, character development, inclusive teaching, and student development across the Cedar Crest community.
Over the past several years, Cedar Crest has built a strong foundation for this work through initiatives that support inclusive teaching and student success. These efforts include the development and implementation of the College’s Inclusive Teaching Rubric, which has been used to assess 95 courses since 2022 and is now being incorporated into the College’s academic review process. The College’s First-Year Seminar has also strengthened how students approach their first year, helping them navigate the academic and personal challenges of college life.
The ECI grant will allow Cedar Crest to build on these efforts and further integrate character and belonging into the student experience. A major focus will be enhancing the First-Year Seminar to help students develop qualities such as integrity, empathy, resilience, responsibility, purpose, and civic engagement while building academic confidence and a sense of belonging.
The grant will support Belonging in Progress, a collaborative initiative designed to make belonging and character development part of the everyday Cedar Crest experience. The work brings together faculty, staff, and student leaders across four connected areas: inclusive teaching, First-Year Seminar redesign, employee wellbeing, and student leadership and belonging. As part of the initiative, Cedar Crest will develop and pilot two Belonging in Progress frameworks, one for students and one for faculty and staff. The frameworks are being developed side by side, based on the understanding that students cannot fully belong in a community where the people serving them do not.
The grant will also help Cedar Crest connect the Inclusive Teaching Rubric with student feedback, allowing the College to better understand how students experience belonging in their courses and use that information to guide improvements in teaching and curriculum.
“At Cedar Crest, we believe character grows in community,” said Vice President of Mission Integration and Strategy Leon S. John, Jr., Ph.D. “The Belonging in Progress frameworks for employees and students will bring together our faculty, staff, and student leaders to define what it means to belong and how character development plays a role in that. We are incredibly proud of how much our community has grown through the work we have collectively done, and how we will continue to grow together.”
The Educating Character Initiative was founded in 2023 through the support of Lilly Endowment Inc. Since its launch, ECI has brought together more than 1,600 faculty, staff and administrators from more than 600 institutions and organizations around a shared purpose of educating character and building communities of character in higher education and beyond. Across its first two grant cycles, ECI awarded $35 million to 146 institutions working to strengthen the understanding, integration, and education of character at colleges and universities across the United States.