2025 Educating Character Initiative: Building Capacity & Community at U.S. Colleges and Universities

Overview

Wake Forest is a community of faculty and staff committed to educating the whole person and transforming students into leaders and citizens of character. The staff for the Program for Leadership and Character focus on advancing this work every day. Our Vision is to inspire, educate, and empower leaders of character at Wake Forest and at colleges and universities across the world.  Our Mission is to use innovative teaching, creative programming, and cutting-edge research to help transform the lives of students, foster an inclusive culture of leadership and character on college campuses, and catalyze a broader public conversation that places character at the center of leadership.

Program Description

The Program for Leadership and Character consists of faculty and staff from a diverse group of disciplines and backgrounds who study and assess leadership and character, as well as students who take on the important and challenging work of developing their leadership and character. Our Educating Character Initiative (ECI) is creating a community of educators interested in character on campuses across the country and world.

The Educating Character Initiative aims to equip a wide range of public and private institutions of higher education, including but not limited to major research universities, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, military academies, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, religiously affiliated colleges, single-gender colleges, and tribal colleges—with the resources, funding, and support needed to integrate character education into their distinctive institutional contexts, curricula, and cultures. The broader aspiration is to foster a robust network that recognizes the value of educating character within higher education.

In addition to organizing workshops, conferences, and convenings and developing resources for faculty and staff, the Educating Character Initiative will award grants to both individuals and institutions.  

Institutional Impact Grants

These three-year grants will provide support to enable institutional leaders, faculty, and staff to infuse character in undergraduate curricula and programming in ways that align organically with their college or university mission, context, and culture. Institutional Impact Grants may be especially useful for institutions that have already begun educating character in their context, that have previously received a Capacity-Building Grant from the ECI, and/or that have faculty and staff with the relevant expertise to undertake a major initiative dedicated to character. We imagine these grants will be focused primarily on coherent and collaborative implementation rather than initial exploration, though we welcome innovative ideas that have not been fully tested. 

ONLY 1 application per institution: Colleges and universities should coordinate Institutional Impact projects internally and plan to apply for no more than one Institutional Impact Grant. In most cases, institutions may apply for an Institutional Impact or Capacity-Building Grant, but not both. 

Award Information: Up to 10 Institutional Impact Grants of between $100,000 and $1,000,000 will be awarded to institutions who wish to undertake a substantial and sustained effort to educate character in undergraduate populations across their institution. We expect to award three grants of between $500,000 and $1,000,000, three grants of between $250,000 and $500,000, and four grants of between $100,000 and $250,000. Organizations should align the size of the request with the impact of the proposed project and their expertise and capacity to steward the funds efficiently and effectively. Since funds are limited, please design projects that will have the maximum impact using the fewest resources.