ENDEAVOR FOUNDATION News:

• • • • • The 13 liberal arts colleges includes St. John’s College in Santa Fe

NEW YORK — The Endeavor Foundation announced Monday it has launched a national collaborative to address student mental health – an issue that the U.S. Surgeon General has declared the “defining health crisis of our time”.

With the Foundation’s support, 13 liberal arts colleges, spanning the country, including St. John’s College in Santa Fe have joined forces to establish collaborative strategies to enhance student mental health and well-being. Endeavor, which has a long history of supporting the liberal arts, has provided $3 million to the colleges to develop and implement pilot projects.

The successful completion of this first phase will enable access to an additional $5.225 million over the next three years, during which the schools will advance their programs.

The collaborative is focused on four main goals: fostering shared learning and active collaboration across all campuses; understanding how the liberal arts context benefits students’ mental health and well-being holistically; devising plans and proposals for implementing the most promising multi-campus projects; and developing a network of cross-institutional capacity and support.

The strategies may include non-traditional educational experiences such as nature-based learning, credit-bearing wellness classes, expanding clinical and non-clinical mental health interventions such as developing communities of care, and exploring personal values to identify meaning early on in college to align with future career paths. 

The colleges are known as the Endeavor Lab Colleges (ELC):

• Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, OH;
• Bennington College in Bennington, VT;
• Blackburn College in Carlinville, IL;
• College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, ME;
• Northland College in Ashland, WI;
• Prescott College in Prescott, AZ;
• Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA;
• St. John’s College, Annapolis in Annapolis, MD;
• St. John’s College, Santa Fe in Santa Fe, NM;
• Sterling College in Craftsbury Common, VT; 
• Unity Environmental University in New Gloucester, ME;
• Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC; and
• Wells College in Aurora, NY.

“The liberal arts have long provided us a way to think about the human condition, over time and in an ever-changing world,” said Ashley Kidd, Vice President and Director of Programs at the Endeavor Foundation. “We’re eager to see how these schools can build on the work on their campuses to help create new systems of thinking about and practicing mental health that are fully integrated into the liberal arts college experience.”  

“All too often we see mental health as a personal challenge and forget the critical role institutions play in facilitating and supporting mental health and well-being,” said Lori Collins-Hall, the grant Project Director and Chief Operating Officer at Sterling College, which is also participating in the project. “A liberal arts education asks us to think about the ways our lives are integrated in and impacted by the larger world. We’re excited to work across this collaborative that understands the important role colleges play in the lives of our students. Our goal is to identify and implement strategies that can help us collectively create new frameworks to address the mental health crisis on our campuses in ways that do not put the burden on our students.”

​​The 13 colleges will work together to establish collaborative strategies to facilitate mental health and well-being by focusing on programs, activities, and services in four thematic areas: 

• Curriculum. Support mental health and well-being through credit-bearing, curricular initiatives, such as writing for developing personal narratives and ways of moving through the world, within the visual and performing arts, and in contemplative education. 
• Purposeful life and work. Support mental health and well-being by helping students explore their personal values, find purpose and meaning, and start the lifelong work of identifying who they want to be and what they want to do during their lives. 
• Place-based experiential learning. Support mental health and well-being through place-based and experiential education in non-traditional classroom spaces, outdoor education, wilderness, outdoor leadership, and resilience training. 
• Expanded services and supports. Support for mental health and well-being, including community care, clinical and non-clinical interventions and approaches, peer counseling, and restorative justice.

“Collaboration across colleges is both an enormous challenge and an enormous opportunity,” said Isabel Roche, Executive Director for Special Programs in Higher Education at Endeavor. “We believe that this group of colleges, which have strong shared values and commitments, can demonstrate the power of collaboration and of responding collectively to issues that impact the lives of young people today, and in doing so, serve as an inspiration to other institutions.”