Students, faculty, staff, and administrators from nearly a dozen institutions recently gathered to explore questions about the future of belonging and mattering in higher education. They tackled topics ranging from ancestral intelligence to AI.
Two multi-year grants from the Lumina Foundation and ECMC Foundation have been supporting research and programming at Vassar around college completion and community college students’ transfer to four-year institutions. This April 29 summit brought together higher education and foundation leaders from across the country at The Vassar Institute for the Liberal Arts to learn more about related outcomes and actionable items.
The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center was awarded an additional grant by The Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation in support of an effort with the Center for Creative Photography (University of Arizona, Tucson) to share the collaborative exhibition Making a Life in Photography: Rollie McKenna with audiences in the southwestern U.S. The exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of the photography of illustrious Vassar alumna Rosalie (“Rollie”) McKenna, Class of 1940.
Andrea Pesavento in Vassar’s Office of Health Promotion and Education received a Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) Higher Ed/Harm Reduction Pilot program grant through the NYS Conference of Local Mental Hygiene Directors. This program is training MHFA instructors at five participating colleges who will then lead sessions for students, faculty, and staff.
Kenneth Foster, Director of Sustainability, received a grant from the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Corps fellowship program to host a summer fellow. EDF’s Climate Corps is a “hands-on summer program” where graduate students are matched with top companies and nonprofit organizations to advance climate and energy goals. Vassar has hosted multiple EDF summer fellows since 2014.
Keri VanCamp, Director of the Preserve at Vassar–in collaboration with Jen Rubbo, Director of the Environmental Cooperative; Dean Jaeger, Grounds Manager; Evan Lasher, Grounds Foreman; and Ethan Skuches, Vassar-Kenauk Conservation Fellow–was selected by the Partners for Climate Action (PCA) for an Ecological Restoration Grant supporting creative and engaging ways to support pollinators through native meadow restoration in the Hudson Valley bioregion.
With support from the Mellon Foundation-funded Community-Engaged Intensives in the Humanities (CEIH) grant, Office of Community-Engaged Learning’s (OCEL) Elizabeth Cannon and Zoë Markwalter presented at the 2024 International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE) Intersections Conference. They traveled to the University of San Diego’s Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice and shared their presentation on “Pedagogical Innovations through Community-Engaged Coursework and Compensation of Community Partners as Co-Educators.”
The Terra Foundation for American Art (Chicago, IL) has made a major grant to the Loeb to support planning with a diverse group of advisors for a reinstallation of the Founding Galleries, home of the mid-nineteenth century works of the Hudson River School that were part of Vassar’s original art collection.
