The Endeavor Lab Colleges—a national consortium of 10 small liberal arts colleges, including Blackburn College—has completed the first phase of its groundbreaking initiative to enhance student mental health and well-being. The Foundation has invested more than $8.5 million to support the project, including $5.225 million over the next three years for Phase 2.
“We are thrilled to move to the next phase of this vital work,” said Dr. Lori Collins-Hall, project director of Endeavor Lab Colleges (ELC). “Thanks to the dedication of our partner institutions and the confidence and commitment of Endeavor Foundation, we are taking meaningful steps to address well-being on our campuses. Our goal is not simply to improve mental health but to transform the way liberal arts colleges engage students in caring, resilient, mission-aligned communities.”
Endeavor Foundation’s transformative investments will empower participating institutions to build on the development and implementation of pilot projects in the first phase by utilizing evidence-based strategies, scaling successful interventions, and deepening cross-campus collaboration.
“At Blackburn, we believe in educating the whole student. Our model blends the richness of a liberal arts education with the hands-on experience of our student-led Work Program, helping students build the skills and resilience they need to thrive in a changing world,” said Larry K. Lee, President of Blackburn College. “With the support of the Endeavor Foundation, we are proud to once again join this collaborative to advance student belonging, mental health, and well-being, experiential learning, and civic engagement.”
The reality of the ELC vision will be lasting, systemic improvements that support the holistic development of students, strengthening their liberal arts education and college experience by placing well-being, belonging, community care, and purpose at the center of their education and campus life.
“Collaboration across colleges is enormously difficult, but it holds enormous opportunity for realizing shared goals and catalyzing renewal in service of what students need to persist and thrive,” said Ashley Kidd, Vice President and Co-Program Director at Endeavor Foundation. “In Phase I of this grant, the Endeavor Lab Colleges demonstrated what working together can achieve, developing a truly inclusive model of engagement and commitment to their shared goals. In a time of challenge and change, Phase 2 of this grant offers a hopeful, collaborative path forward for students and the future of higher education.”
In Phase 2, ELC campuses will continue to collaborate on implementing activities developed across five central initiatives, while establishing program sustainability, widely documenting and disseminating information, and paying particular attention to liberal arts institutions.
“This grant reflects Endeavor’s longtime commitment to liberal arts education,” said Isabel Roche, Co-Program Director at Endeavor. “The liberal arts empower students to see themselves, others, and the world with greater clarity, compassion, and hope. This project brings the liberal arts vision for education of the whole person into sharper focus, putting student flourishing at the center. In doing so, it reaffirms the transformative power of the liberal arts for both mind and spirit, preparing students for every dimension of life.”
Five central initiatives in Phase 2 are interconnected and mutually reinforcing in their aims of placing well-being, belonging, and purpose at the center of each student’s liberal arts experience.
Led by a working group with faculty from each ELC institution, the Cultivating Curricular Review and Innovation initiative invites curricular innovation across and within institutions. It considers and connects what the liberal arts teach about the human condition and experience, integrating concepts and skills related to well-being into the curriculum, co-curriculum, and teaching.
Building Models of Community Care and Resilience focuses on creating a scalable, trauma informed, strengths-based model of community care and resilience centered on the whole person, liberal arts, and well-being that meets the urgent needs of students, faculty, and staff at small, resource-constrained liberal arts colleges. This initiative is reimagining how colleges can embed community care into curricular, co-curricular, and workplace structures to support mental health, well-being, and human flourishing through sustainable, community-based curricula and practices.
Center for Purposeful Life and Work is a virtual, interactive, student-centered ecosystem that offers scalable, evidence-informed programming, self-guided tools, faculty/staff resources, and cross-institutional engagement. The Center will serve as a hub for exploring values, identity, career pathways, and well-being. It will empower students to articulate and pursue purposeful lives and careers during college and beyond.
Mapping Belonging represents an innovative and powerful student-centered approach to fostering well-being, engagement, and resilience by reimagining campus maps as immersive tools for connection to place, history, nature, and community. Rather than serving solely as instruments of navigation, these dynamic physical and digital maps help students orient themselves within the cultural, ecological, and social landscape of their campus.
Nature Rx and Nature-based programming are aligned with the Mapping Belonging initiative to help students identify and connect with the green and blue spaces across their campuses, recognizing the enduring relationship between nature and human well-being, rooted in long standing practices of healing and connecting to the land. This initiative explores ways to integrate both active and reflective engagement with the natural world in the daily lives of students and the broader campus community.
Small liberal arts colleges cultivate relationships and foster community, buffering students from isolation and loneliness, and emphasizing a strong sense of belonging. These campuses nurture students’ passion, balance, integrity, vision, and collective responsibility, preparing them for wise and ethical stewardship of their world. Endeavor Lab Colleges