A team of Vassar colleagues secured an Ecological Restoration Grant from Partners for Climate Action Hudson Valley to support high-visibility riparian restoration at the Vassar Preserve through tree and shrub plantings.
Carol Murray, Executive Director of Wimpfheimer Nursery School (WNS) and Infant Toddler Center (ITC); BethAnn Serwatka, Site Director of WNS; and Nicole Bonelli, Site Director of ITC, secured new grant funding from the New York State Office of Children and Family Services’ Child Care Stabilization program. Funding will support teacher retention, wages, and professional development.
This grant award will support the maintenance, operation, and securing of permanent collections of natural specimens, alongside the Preserve’s educational programs that interpret the collection. Students of all ages regularly visit each year to learn more about the Preserve’s rich diversity of plants, birds, amphibians, mammals, and reptiles.
The goals of this exciting new grant are to study the effect of Vassar’s long-standing Exploring Transfer (ET) program on community college students’ subsequent completion of four-year degrees, improve the ET program as needed, and work with other liberal arts colleges to catalyze ET-like programs that promote community college student transfer to four-year colleges.
John Bradley, Executive Director of the Vassar Education Collaboration (VEC), received a Youth Activities & Opportunities Grant from the City of Poughkeepsie to support VEC and a Community Fund Grant from United Way of the Dutchess-Orange Region to support the Vassar English Language Learner Outreach Program (VELLOP).
The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center received funds from The Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation to support a 2024 exhibition of photographs by Rosalie “Rollie” McKenna, a 1940 graduate of Vassar who retained close ties to her alma mater throughout her lifetime, situated within a broader history of twentieth-century American photography.
Vassar is an awardee of the Teagle Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) joint grant program Cornerstone: Learning for Living, which seeks to revitalize the role of humanities in general education. This grant award will support conversation and planning focused on how we might use the First Year Writing Seminar (FYWS) to deepen faculty and student’s shared experience of transformative engagements with texts, the focus of the Cornerstone initiative.
The grant will enhance accessibility in Vassar’s Learning Management System and online course content through an integrated accessibility suite for Moodle and support related training materials and resources for faculty to help them make their course materials more accessible.
This grant award will support invasive species monitoring, assessment, and control this summer on Vassar’s Ecological Preserve, the FAF Sharpe Reservation, Hudson Highlands Land Trust’s (HHLT) Granite Mountain Preserve, and LCC’s Biological Field Station as well as related education and outreach activities.
