Hope College will enhance its emphasis on character development with a grant received through the Educating Character Initiative of Wake Forest University’s Program for Leadership and Character. Hope will focus on the virtues of gratitude and generosity, using the grant to help scale up a foundational programmatic component of the Hope Forward initiative that the college has been piloting since the fall of 2021.
Faculty information about the Character Forward Grant
Hope is one of only 29 higher-education institutions nationwide — and the only college or university in Michigan — to have received one of the three-year awards through the Educating Character Initiative’s (ECI’s) Institutional Impact Grants program, which was funded by a grant to the ECI by Lilly Endowment Inc. As described by ECI in its announcement, the awards “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 mission, context and culture.”
Through its three-year, $699,432 award, Hope will provide funding in four areas: for faculty who wish to integrate themes of gratitude and generosity into their courses; for underwriting research focused on the two virtues; for exploring ways to infuse the virtues into co-curricular programming; and for developing a “character hub” that will continue to make resources available and help connect faculty and staff engaged in virtue- and character-development efforts. The grant, which is running through August of 2027, is being administered by Nicole Dunteman, who is the senior program director of Hope Forward, and Dr. Daryl Van Tongeren, who is a professor of psychology and director of the college’s Frost Center for Social Science Research.
“The purpose is to coordinate and accelerate the ongoing character development efforts by infusing the core tenets of Hope Forward into the broader educational culture of all of Hope College,” Van Tongeren said. “We plan to intentionally instill components of the program into each aspect of the undergraduate experience — curricular, co-curricular, and research and scholarship — as a pathway toward holistic character education and development.”
The virtues have been the bedrock of Hope Forward. Through Hope Forward, the college seeks to fully fund tuition for all students to remove financial circumstances as a barrier to obtaining a Hope education, and to eliminate the need for graduates to chase income to repay student-loan debt rather than bring hope to the world by pursuing lives of impact. The concept, however, is not “free” tuition, but a pay-it-forward model. The students’ tuition will have been paid through gifts to the college by others; in turn, they will be asked to give to the college after graduation to provide the same transformational education to those who attend after them.
As the college explains on its website about Hope Forward, “This is our long-term vision to ensure access for every student who comes through our doors. It’s an entirely new funding model based on a covenantal relationship rooted in generosity and gratitude.
“Hope’s Christian mission makes us uniquely positioned to revolutionize higher education through the message of generosity. One might summarize the Gospel by saying, ‘you are covered; now go and live differently.’ Hope is saying, ‘your tuition is covered; now go and live generously.’”
Although graduates’ gifts will sustain the effort, Hope is in the process of raising funds for its endowment to get it in place for all students. In the meantime, Hope has piloted the initiative with a new cohort of incoming students each fall starting in 2021, with a total of 120 students, freshmen through seniors, currently participating.
In addition to receiving the tuition benefit, which has been paid for the pilot by donors, the students in the cohorts participate in additional activities such as seminars, off-campus retreats, service-learning experiences and book studies to reflect on the concepts of community and generosity. Core objectives include instilling gratitude, a sense of purpose, curiosity, empathy and ethical decision-making.
Across Hope Forward’s first three years, 95% of the participating students report that the program has had a positive impact on their commitment to gratitude and generosity as guiding virtues. As one shared, “I am given Hope Forward as a gift to think of myself less, both financially and mentally, as I steward my education well so that I can pour back into others who would continue to do the same. I go to college with an assurance that I am covered along with a glad responsibility to give back by passionately pursuing my dream to be a doctor who cares for his patients as much as he cares for the sciences.”
Even though the college-wide emphasis on gratitude and generosity supported by the ECI grant is expanding on Hope Forward’s deliberate exploration of the two virtues, Dunteman noted that the prioritization is reciprocal. The concepts, she said, were integrated into Hope Forward as reflections of the college’s overall promotion of faithful leadership and grateful service as manifestations of Christian commitment.
“Hope Forward is being more of who we already are,” she said. “Our mission as a college is to prepare students to live lives of leadership and service. This is building on the bedrock that’s already here.”
More information about Hope Forward is available at hope.edu/hopeforward