Author: Mollie Ames

Who Are You?

Posted on by Mollie Ames

In a scene from the new series Overcompensating, two impossibly enthusiastic orientation leaders address a circle of wide-eyed first years. “Welcome to college, where you can have a fresh start!” one proclaims. “And you can be whoever you want to be!” the second finishes. A third leader, disabled and in a wheelchair, rolls her eyes at them and questions aloud in signature deadpan: “Can you?”

The show’s protagonist is Benny Scanlon, who begins college with a quest to fit in and quickly learns it comes at a cost. His pursuit of social success leads him to not only hide his gay identity but perform his vision of what is acceptable — masculinity, straightness, wealth — in the most extreme way possible. The façade begins slipping almost immediately, as his efforts to imitate who he imagines everyone else to be battle against his instincts to be who he really is. 

For many in real life, the college experience offers an opportunity to self-discover beyond the confines of home for the first time. Even those who have lived independently before will find themselves starting fresh to some extent, needing to present themselves in a new place to new classmates. From the photos they put on their walls to the clothes they wear on the first day of class, they are cultivating, maybe even curating, an image of themselves — an identity.

Some will look forward to the opportunity for reinvention, while others struggle to determine who they want to put forward — and not just at the start. Either way, this process of identity formation is coming to the fore with the start of their adult lives. And it carries implications for wellbeing, especially as the developmentally crucial college years tend to coincide with the emergence of mental health disorders. With a strong sense of identity linked to overall wellbeing, the role of college as a laboratory for self-discovery may indeed be one of its most important.

For those approaching college eager to reimagine themselves, the relief could be immediate. Living away from the people who know them and the family, places, and activities typically associated with them may feel liberating. That’s the case in Overcompensating for Benny’s fast friend, Carmen, who’s ready to move on from her perceived identity in high school as a socially invisible “no one.” She represents all those who have wanted to shed reputations they view as having pigeonholed them: “jock,” “nerd,” “troublemaker,” or “no one.” 

Others may anticipate college as the place not to become someone completely new but to fulfill some part of themselves formerly untapped or suppressed. Unlike the Benny character, some LGBTQ students enter college excited to be able to express and explore that side of themselves more deeply. Beyond queer students, the general diversity on college campuses may offer those hoping to explore some latent background or interest — a spiritual tradition, academic discipline, professional venture —more opportunities to do so than ever before.   

The act of attending higher education itself, or a specific institution, can also play a role in building a sense of self. That is, being a college student or a college-educated person becomes an important identity marker. First-generation college students could derive pride from that new status, as well as meaningful connection among those who share it. At schools with certain branded reputations or key programs — a passionate sports fandom, elite academics, even widespread appreciation for the outdoors — students may embrace these qualities and begin to absorb them into their individual self-concept.

The pursuit of identity often stems from being drawn to a broader whole — to belong. Identity and belonging are like two sides of a coin, both connoting a sense of purpose and meaning important to wellbeing, though one is derived from oneself and the other from connections with others. The lines between them are also blurry, as people derive individual purpose from engagement with others and membership to a group. This is often the case in college, where students’ search for themselves tends to land them in communion with others: affinity groups, newspaper offices, Greek life. Especially for those from marginalized backgrounds — LGBTQ students, first-gen students — access to peers and mentors who share their experiences can be a key catalyst for identity formation.

Of course, there are tempting pitfalls in the process of seeking identity and finding belonging at college, particularly if students do so at the expense of who they know themselves to be at their core. For all the opportunities universities offer to explore new or untapped facets of self, dominant social forces may offer a path of least resistance: becoming someone acceptable but not necessarily authentic. In a new, potentially more competitive environment, the crush of uncertainty and insecurity can close in and push many to feel they need to prove their worth. 

There are tempting pitfalls in the process of seeking identity and finding belonging at college, particularly if students do so at the expense of who they know themselves to be at their core.

This tug and pull extends into the academic domain, where imposter syndrome is prominent, specifically among students accustomed to academic success who find themselves in the company of others equally proficient. The sense that their talents are ‘less than’ because they are no longer superlative can leave young people feeling unsure of themselves and the way forward. A similar effect may spread among high-performing students from marginalized groups who fear being perceived as undeserving of their achievements. Again, contending with how they see themselves compared to how others see them is part of the difficult work of becoming who they are.  

Identity formation can feel like an education unto its own, but if students realize later that certain turns led them in the wrong direction, that doesn’t mean taking them was wrong. Although some may arrive at college fully formed, assured of who they are or plan on becoming, many more will likely find identity formation to be an unpredictable and ever-evolving course — one in which self-discovery has no end point and builds from knowing who they are as much as who they are not.  For Benny and Carmen in Overcompensating, their valiant efforts pretending to be other people still leave them careening towards one apparent inevitability: themselves.

Good Sports

Posted on by Mollie Ames

To the Rev. Brian Konkol, religion and sports have a lot in common.

The college basketball player-turned Lutheran minister knows neither is completely “good” or “bad.” With sports, he might overhear vicious trash talk in the stands, only to witness high-fives, or a teary embrace, between strangers in the stadium parking lot moments later.

“It’s remarkable,” he said, “and oftentimes horrible.”

As dean of Hendricks Chapel at Syracuse University, Konkol wants to continue exploring the vast spectrum of morality sports seem to provoke and, ideally, tip the scales in a more positive direction. He teamed up with Jeremy Jordan, dean of Syracuse’s David B. Falk College of Sport, and together, they devised a character education initiative to cultivate virtue in sports by focusing on a not-so-silent and yet often overlooked majority: the fans.

Examining virtue in fandom is a novel concept within a very traditional discipline called “character education.” The rising field in the college setting focuses on helping students consider how to be better people, as opposed to just better learners. Efforts now underway include those at Wake Forest University, where the Educating Character Initiative (E.C.I.) supports related programs at dozens of institutions across the country.

On July 11, the E.C.I. announced the latest winners of its “Institutional Impact Grants,” which fund large-scale character initiatives at schools over a three-year term and with up to $1 million. “Character Development and Sport Fan Engagement,” the Syracuse proposal, was among the 33 selected.

In the fall, Syracuse students will begin to see and feel the project’s presence in a variety of areas on their home turf. Conversations about sports fandom and ethics — the grounds for teamwork, leadership, and loyalty, as well as rivalry, aggression, and exclusion — will start to appear in both existing curricula and new activities, including peer-led workshops, game-day campaigns, and speaker series.

It’s an initiative fit for Syracuse, and for a grant with explicitly “institutional” intentions, because it plays into two of the school’s most unique and influential forces: spirituality and sports.

While Syracuse is not religiously affiliated, Konkol’s colleagues said his sweeping engagement on campus has made the multi-faith center he represents a core part of university life. His co-creator from the Falk College of Sport, Dean Jeremy Jordan, even described Hendricks Chapel as “the thing that kind of binds us and keeps us and holds us together.”

“That’s a real asset that probably people don’t understand unless you’ve been at Syracuse and I didn’t appreciate until I came here,” Jordan said.

Sports, too, are key to school culture thanks to not only the athletic offerings but academic ones. In addition to its Division I status and some top performing teams, the university is home to both the Falk College of Sport and Newhouse School of Public Communications, which offers a sports media track.

This summer, Syracuse changed the name of what was the “Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics” to, simply, “Falk College of Sport.” The shift reflects efforts to provide an exclusive space for the study of sports, as well as advance the institution’s broader leadership in the area.

“The chancellor wants sport to be something that differentiates this university and is seen as something that’s special here,” Jordan said.

With Konkol’s specialty in what he called “service to the common good” and Jordan’s in what he called “the power of sport and what it can do,” the two deans said the decision to combine their work was a “natural” one.

“Maybe we’re coming from different sides of the neighborhood,” Jordan said. “But we definitely have found a common ground that we’re excited about.”

Others have similarly recognized the potential in sports as a vessel for character education — the opportunity to explore moral, social, and psychological development in dynamics between teammates, coaches, rivals, and self.

The difference in the Syracuse case, and what piqued the interest of grant makers at the E.C.I., is the focus on sports off the field as much as on — on the fans, instead of just athletes.

This point of emphasis was of course intentional on the part of Konkol and Jordan, who not only love sports and prefer not to see them tainted by boos and jeers but are keen to engage as many people as possible in their work. “How could we impact a larger part of our student population?” Jordan said of their thinking.

In the end, the math was simple: “We have 500 student-athletes here at Syracuse. We have 22,000 students,” Jordan said. Whether that 22,000 includes more “hardcore” or “casual” fans, he added, the goal is to engage them all.

“Being able to include everyone in the project was really important to me,” Jordan said. With a more universal approach, he imagines, the initiative could give way to “new knowledge that potentially extends beyond Syracuse.”

After all, the lessons students take away need not apply only to their role as fans. Teamwork, for example, is one of the major virtues Konkol and Jordan will encourage participants to consider because, while modeled through sports, it translates to countless other domains.

“We’re all teammates,” Konkol explained. “I’m a teammate in my marriage. I’m a teammate in my work environment, a teammate in my community, in civic organizations.”

“I do believe that there is a way in which as a fan of sport, seeing great teams at work can in turn help the observer to embody teamwork in various facets of their life,” he said.

“I do believe that there is a way in which as a fan of sport, seeing great teams at work can in turn help the observer to embody teamwork in various facets of their life.”

Even as Jordan recognizes the limitations of operating this work on a single campus, he said the potential feels powerful. “I don’t want to present that we’re going to save the world. That’s not what we’re doing,” he said. “But I think there’s real opportunity to apply this beyond simply the two hours or the three hours that someone is at a sporting event.”

For students who study sports media at the Newhouse School of Public Communications, the character initiative will enhance training and conversations about journalism ethics already built into the curricula.

The director of the Newhouse Sports Media Center, Olivia Stomski, takes sports’ impact on fans very seriously. She began grappling with that influence when she was still just a girl and watched her single father escape into his nightly games, free of the financial and familial burdens that weighed during the day.

“Sports bring people that joy, and I always wanted to be a part of that,” she said. “But I also understood that it was a pulpit from which people teach others.”

As a teacher, Stomski is dedicated to ensuring the next generation of journalists realizes how every one of their decisions — from camera angles to replays to scripts — affects viewers. “A big part of what we’re teaching is understanding that responsibility: how media shapes the culture of fans, how media shapes the behavior of people when it comes to sports,” she said.

The funds from the character education grant will help bring new intentionality and accountability to Stomski’s efforts. “We are promising that this is going to happen, and I need to see evidence that we are doing that,” she said.

Stomski will also be involved in a longitudinal study of how students’ attitudes and behaviors change over the course of the initiative. Her role will be to consider trends in their sports media consumption — where, when, how much — in relationship to indicators of character.

Jordan said this research will be unique because it focuses, again, on sports and character among fans instead of athletes and also because it is a long-term, three-year study. “It’s exciting because it allows you to pinpoint the reason for change in the outcomes that you’re seeing,” he said.

To Konkol, a job well done will look like outcomes indicating the project helped students be more intentional about their values and virtues — to whatever extent. If everyone was even a little more thoughtful, the preacher in him can’t help but believe, life on campus, and beyond, might change quite a lot.

“Dean Jordan talks a lot about ‘sport for good,’” Konkol said.

“I say amen to that.”

What is “Academic Flourishing”?

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Tyler VanderWeele, Ph.D., has in interesting C.V. He is a social scientist, an epidemiologist, and a theologian. And in the world of flourishing research, he is somewhat of a celebrity. VanderWeele is the director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. The initiative aims to study and promote human flourishing and to catalyze knowledge across disciplines that intersect with key components, including family, friendship, virtue, community, work, beauty, forgiveness, religion, purpose, and meaning. 

The program’s most recent research, the Global Flourishing Study, made headlines around the world for its eye-opening preliminary findings. Among them was the collapse of the U-shaped pattern of flourishing, which traditionally indicates greater levels of wellbeing among young people and older adults. According to the report, it was the poor mental health and wellbeing of the Gen Z cohort that caused the disruption. 

This month, VanderWeele and his team launched a separate initiative examining flourishing among young people — this time college students and their role in what VanderWeele calls “academic flourishing.” He describes the concept as “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of an academic community’s life are good,” including the degree to which institutions help students grow as human beings. 

The Academic Flourishing Initiative invites colleges and universities throughout the country to join in data collection and reflection in three areas: the individual flourishing of students, the flourishing of the campus community, and students’ perceptions as to how university life has contributed to their own formation. The last area excites VanderWeele, as he sees the understanding of how colleges contribute to attributes such as citizenship, character, purpose, and meaning as both innovative and, in some cases, controversial. 

In his office in Cambridge, VanderWeele offers coffee and conversation about the issues he has made the center of his scholarship and curiosity. 

LW: How did the Academic Flourishing Initiative come about? 

TV: Our working definition of flourishing is “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good, including the contexts, the communities, the environments in which they live.” And while we’ve been looking at this at a global scale across numerous countries with our Global Flourishing Study, we do also firmly believe that a lot of the actual work of promoting flourishing happens in more local institutions. And from our prior reviews, we suggest four major institutional pathways to flourishing: family, work, education, and religious community.

As we’ve continued to reflect on how to promote flourishing in practice, we’ve thought that what we need to do is focus on each of these institutional pathways — on the dynamics that are specific to each of them and on how we can further strengthen opportunities to flourish. That led to work with schools and thinking about colleges and universities as well. On the school front, we partnered with the O.E.C.D. to develop a framework for metrics for education, for flourishing, which we’re also now working on operationalizing. But being embedded ourselves in an academic context, we thought we should take these notions seriously for our own university community.  What does it mean for an academic community to flourish?  It certainly involves the individual flourishing of the students, the staff, and the faculty which involves our established flourishing assessments — happiness and health and meaning and relationships and character and financial security.

But the flourishing of the community is more than that. It is also about good relationships within the community, proficient leadership, healthy structures and practices in place to help sustain the community with a sense of belonging and a common mission. To that end, we’ve taken our community wellbeing measure and adapted it for university context. But then we also thought, let’s turn to the mission and vision statements of colleges and universities and see how they reflect on their own understanding of themselves.

“Let’s turn to the mission and vision statements of colleges and universities and see how they reflect on their own understanding of themselves.”

You see pretty consistent themes, especially in research universities, related to the generation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge. But you also see, very regularly, notions of student formation — that institutions are here to help shape citizen leaders of the future, to help develop students who can contribute in important ways to society, to develop leaders who have creative capacities to address, in an ethical manner, some of society’s most challenging problems.

And we started thinking, Well, if we’re going to take the mission of these institutions seriously, we should start by assessing whether these beautiful, grand, important aspirations are, in fact, being achieved. Perhaps we can begin by asking students whether they think they’ve been shaped in these ways as part of their university or college experience. Has the university helped them to grow in wisdom and justice and leadership and capacities to work across difference — in addition to, of course, developing knowledge and capacities for critical thinking? It was those sorts of considerations that really led to this work and what we’re calling “academic flourishing.”

LW:  What is your pitch to institutions on why they should participate?   

TV: Essentially, we’re saying that the data collection that is typically taking place — often on retention rates and academic performance, job placement and salaries, mental health, experiences of bias and discrimination — is generally good. This is important work that should be done. But students who come to universities, and parents who send their children to universities — indeed, the universities themselves — often aspire to more. And if that’s the case, why aren’t we doing assessments on these other matters: whether there has been a growth in wisdom; whether they have greater capacity to think critically; whether they have been prepared for leadership; whether this has helped them to clarify their life purpose and define meaning? Students want this. If parents want this, and if universities and colleges aspire to this, let’s collect the data.

This is not being presented as an alternative to what colleges and universities are already doing, but rather as a supplement. And if colleges and universities don’t want to do that, then so be it. But what we’ve seen is that a number of them do, and so this is just an invitation to do so.

LW: In terms of the invitation to the colleges and universities, what exactly are you inviting them to do? How do you engage with them?

TV: We’re inviting them to participate both in assessment and data collection campus-wide, and then also to join a community of practice with other colleges and universities that are doing similar data collection. The idea is to reflect on the data, to try to understand it, and to try to work out together what the best ways forward are. How do you address the weaknesses as well as the strengths within a particular institution?

The heart of this academic flourishing survey is focused on — again — first, the individual flourishing of the students; second, the student’s assessments of whether the university or college is flourishing as a community; and third — and this is the real innovation — the students’ perceptions of the contribution of university life to their own development: to their growth and knowledge and critical thinking, yes, but also to their moral formation and character development and their capacities for leadership and citizenship, and their ability to find meaning and growth in the process of their college experience.

And so we’ve included 24 of these student formation questions, in addition to the individual flourishing and the community wellbeing questions. Universities are being invited to collect this data, and we have an automated Qualtrics survey to do this in a very straightforward manner. And we’ve now set up infrastructure to immediately convert that survey into a report for the individual school. And then that data will be used in a much larger database to try to understand dynamics across schools and universities. In addition, we’ll be hosting meetings and events to discuss the similarities and differences across institutions. If one university has a particular strength, we’ll talk about how this came about. How can the other universities strengthen in this regard?

LW: Do you get push back from people saying that flourishing and this student formation work is outside of the scope of higher education?

TV: In our academic paper, we include a principle with regard to the appropriate scope of efforts for flourishing in education. And we would agree that it’s not the school’s or the university’s responsibility to sustain all aspects of a student’s flourishing. This requires families. This requires neighborhoods. This requires workplaces. This requires religious communities. You can’t make the school responsible for everything, and they’re not equipped to do so.

On the other hand, just to say education is only about vocational career preparation seems too narrow because you have these extraordinary narratives — anecdotes — about transformative experiences. There’s real potential there, and we don’t want to restrict that potential. We’ve said what we’ve proposed is that the proper scope of educational efforts oriented towards flourishing concerns those aspects of flourishing around which societal consensus can be attained and for which educational leaders and staff and faculty are prepared to address.

LW: What has been the reaction to the student formation work?

TV: Different institutions each have a very different focus, and that needs to be acknowledged. We have divided the student formation questions into these four domains: knowledge and critical thinking, character formation, citizenship and leadership, and then meaning and growth. Not all of these aspects of student formation will necessarily be of interest to all institutions.

We think pretty much any college would be interested in increasing cognitive capacities and knowledge, so those we feel are always core. What we’ve also argued is, even for institutions that don’t embrace character formation as part of their mission, some of this is necessary to accomplish the cognitive and epistemic goals of their institutions. You need a certain level of perseverance to work through difficulties and to push one’s mind. You need a certain level of courage to work through controversial or challenging questions. And you need honesty in test-taking and research practices. We need justice and patience to be able to hear different perspectives we might not like.

I think everyone would agree on a lot of this. Take courage. Do we want our students to be cowardly? Let’s get a show of hands amongst the trustees and the faculty — who wants our students to be cowardly? What about honesty? Who wants our students to be dishonest? What about your practical wisdom? Who wants our students to be foolish? You’re just not going to get many takers. There’s a lot of individual character strengths that I think we can agree are important.

A number of colleges and universities have real visions of flourishing for their students, and that includes meaning and growth. Different institutions may place different weights on these various aspects of student formation, and we are not trying to be prescriptive. What we’re saying is, collect the data and hopefully your strengths align with where your primary areas of focus are. And if not, then it’s time to work on it.

LW: Do you find that schools are interested in flourishing because of the mental health association?

TV: Yes, I think there may be interest in flourishing because of mental health concerns, but we are trying to broaden beyond this. I think there may be roughly equal interest in the flourishing of the students and in these student formation questions. We’ve been leading with student formation as the real innovation here because there are other universities collecting wellbeing data. But all these aspects are related. I do think the mental health and wellbeing crisis amongst youth has gotten much of society to take these matters more seriously and to reflect upon them. What are the sources of that decline? I do think one of the sources is a lack of meaning, a lack of purpose. This is evident in surveys as well, when asking younger adults and students: What do they long for? What are they seeking? I think meaning is increasingly a common theme there.

LW: Four of your student formation questions are included in the Wall Street Journal college rankings. What does that indicate?

TV: We are certainly pleased that they would take these matters seriously, but we’ll let the college and university rankings folks continue their work. We are, however, going to try to use this data collection with the Wall Street Journal to launch the movement, but our goal after this is not to directly participate in any sort of ranking endeavors. We are focusing on the relative strengths and weaknesses of each institution, rather than comparing them. What can you be proud of and perhaps use in your marketing materials? Where are areas for growth, which you may not put in your marketing materials but want to work on internally? And then what do you learn from other institutions that may have different strengths and weaknesses than you?

LW: What’s next for the Academic Flourishing Initiative?

TV: We’re just starting out, and we’re focused on students. But as discussed in the academic piece, ultimately, if we’re talking about the flourishing of a community, that includes faculty and staff as well. So that’s another direction we would like to eventually go. We’d also like to look at alumni and parents. I think employers would be another interesting aspect of this. But we needed to begin somewhere, and students seem to be the right place to being.

A Recipe for Growth and Love

Posted on by Mollie Ames

If you asked people to describe the Healing Meals Community Project, you might get different answers. For families experiencing a health crisis, it is a lifeline of nutritious, medically tailored meals delivered with a personal note of support. For the high school students who prepare the food, and write the notes, it is a unique opportunity to serve others, while discovering the good in themselves. Perhaps the best way to describe Healing Meals is as an organization that leverages the powerful relationship between food, health, and community. 

“We want everyone who comes through our doors to feel better when they leave and bring that energy to the next person they come in contact with,” Sarah Leathers, the C.E.O. of Healing Meals, said at its annual fundraiser in June.  

According to the Healing Meals team, that positivity is baked into every meal they make; and, they say, their clients can taste it. As a healing protocol for patients dealing with a serious illness, the organization prepares and delivers meals to families in Connecticut’s Hartford, Middlesex, and Litchfield Counties. Eighty percent of those who receive the food are eligible to do so for free. All of it is organic, locally sourced, and nutritious, aimed at nourishing patients with medical conditions and/or limited diets.

Healing Meals is among a growing national community dedicated to “food as medicine,” meaning they advocate for food-based interventions in health care. Research shows that tailoring meals to meet a client’s specific medical diagnosis leads to positive outcomes in health and satisfaction for people with severe, complex, and/or chronic illnesses. But anyone who has been in the Healing Meals kitchen, or worked in the gardens, or delivered meals to families, knows that this work is not just about food. 

As part of its model, Healing Meals enlists teenage volunteers who show up daily, put their phones aside, and help grow, cook and prepare the food under the supervision of a chef and other adult mentors. Part experiential learning, part youth empowerment, the program lets students learn about the relationship between food and health, become an integral part of a kitchen crew, and, often, gain meaning, agency and belonging.  

“From the moment I walked in, I felt instantly welcomed,” said Ben, a rising high school senior who is interning at Healing Meals this summer. “All of the other volunteers were just incredibly helpful to me. It was nothing I had really felt before.”

Since its founding in 2016, Healing Meals has engaged 700 youth volunteers, the majority of whom stay beyond their first experience. Leathers said while the organization’s dual mission – supporting clients and students alike — can be challenging for donors to categorize, the success of the youth development program has taught her that one purpose often serves another. At a time when 40 percent of high schoolers report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, Healing Meals is becoming a model for a different kind of youth volunteerism, where the kids that are helping others may be getting far more in return.  

Organic Roots

The Healing Meals story began in California, where Leathers’ sister, Cathryn Couch, was running a similar organization called Ceres Community Project. Now serving more than 2,500 clients throughout Northern California, Ceres also has a youth development component, though Couch said its inclusion was somewhat serendipitous.  

As a well-known caterer in the Bay Area, Couch was asked by a friend to give her daughter a volunteer job for the summer. At the time, she was helping a woman undergoing cancer treatment with medically tailored meals for herself and her family. Realizing the growing need for this kind of support within her community — and witnessing the empathy and confidence her young intern was gaining — Couch put it all together, gave up her successful catering business, and launched Ceres. 

“It addressed so many needs in the community and so many things I care deeply about,” she wrote in her origin story on the organization’s web site. “Young people would learn to cook. People who needed healing food would have it. We would help teach people about the link between what we eat and our health. And we’d help restore the idea of caring for our neighbors, something that has been lost between my parent’s generation and my own.”

Leathers had long hoped to launch something similar in Connecticut, where the sisters were raised. Having experienced a personal health crisis in 2011, she began studying the link between nutrition and health and the relationship between the mind, body and spirit. But she had also been a tutor to students with disabilities and a job coach to young people, including boys who hadn’t finished high school and were preparing to enter the construction field. Leathers, who is an engineer by training, built the Healing Meals model with these experiences as scaffolding.

“No matter where you come from or what your story is, every young person deserves to feel seen, valued, and supported,” she said. “We all need someone who genuinely cares and who helps us grow with accountability and love.”

The opportunity to mentor youth volunteers as part of the food-as-medicine model was particularly appealing to Leathers’ co-founder, Ellen Palmer. A certified holistic health and life coach, Palmer had worked with teenagers and young adults with stress and anxiety. Yes, the students would provide a valuable service, but they would also have an opportunity to contribute to something meaningful, away from the pressure of college prep and social media.

“Young people need a place to go where they can feel worthy and learn about themselves,” said Palmer, who was with the organization until 2023.

In November 2015, Leathers and Palmer went to California with their other two co-founders Ellen Deutsch and Emily Safino to complete the Ceres affiliate training course. They launched the Healing Meals Community Project from a dining room table and used a borrowed kitchen for the first year. From an event posted on Facebook, they got a handful of adult volunteers, their first four clients and $50,000 in initial funding. That funding has grown to over $1.4 million per year from people and organizations who have touched, or are touched by, the Healing Meals mission.

“The objective at Healing Meals is to have youth lean into the positive belief that we have about them: ‘You are amazing. You are capable. You can’t mess this up. We love you.'”

Cook. Breathe. Grow.

Nine years and more than 218,000 meals later, Healing Meals now has an industrial kitchen inside what was a former golf club, sitting at the bottom of a low mountain range in Simsbury, Conn. There are organic gardens and free-range chickens out on the grounds. The students come in just after school and grab their aprons. But before they get to work preparing whatever meal the chef has planned for the day, they enter a circle, hear from a recent client, and giggle through the icebreaker.

Questions in circle range from “What animal would you want to be?” to “What does Healing Meals mean to you?” Most of the kids start out as strangers, some frightened to socialize beyond screens and across differences. But Palmer said the immediacy of the task before them accelerates a special connection.

“There’s a level setting that goes on in the Healing Meals kitchen,” she said.  “We’re all in it together. Someone is chopping vegetables. Someone is mopping the floor. Someone is working on a recipe. Somebody else is taking out the garbage.” 

Executive Chef Joe Bucholz with student volunteers. Via Healing Meals.

Joe Bucholz is Healing Meals’ executive chef.  He said there are major differences between his current workplace and the upscale restaurant kitchen he used to run, particularly around command and control. “I do a lot of supervising, a lot of coaching, a lot of connecting,” he said. “But I’m not actually cooking the food.”  He said he is always surprised when he hears parents say, “In our house, you are famous.”

At Healing Meals, the students are involved in food and nutrition in a number of ways. Their shifts often begin with a lesson about what they are preparing, where it is sourced, why it is being used. They are invited to eat what they cook and provide suggestions on how it can be improved or scaled. The adults in the room are there to coax the learning, whether by teaching the volunteers how to gather herbs or asking them to improvise when they’ve run out of cilantro. While there are many important protocols to follow, and safety guardrails strongly enforced, the message the youth receive is “We trust you.”

“The objective at Healing Meals is to have youth lean into the positive belief that we have about them,” said Palmer. “’You are amazing. You are capable. You can’t mess this up. We love you.’”

After preparing and packaging meals, students sit down and write individual notes to each person the organization serves. The kids are encouraged to share positive thoughts and whatever is on their minds. Instead of “Get well soon,” the notes might say “It was such a beautiful day in the garden” or “I really enjoyed making these enchiladas for you.”

“It’s great to see how much they love this part,” said Leathers. “A lot of times, the clients write back, and that makes them feel like, ‘Oh my gosh, they cared about my card.’” Just outside the Healing Meals kitchen is a wall with hundreds of notes the students have received. 

While much of the volunteer experience unfolds organically, leadership and confidence are intentionally nurtured at Healing Meals. Students earn a Blue Apron after 50 hours of service and a Chef’s Coat after 100 hours. This final designation comes with an invitation to join the youth development committee, for which students meet regularly and contribute ideas and feedback that have led to enhancements in the program.

Addie, who will be leaving for college in the fall, has been volunteering at Healing Meals for three years. She was recently invited to join the board as a junior member. She said that, since starting at Healing Meals, her perspective on the work has flipped from “something that would be good on my resume that I should probably do”  to “an unbelievable experience that would also be good on my resume.” 

“I feel like people are motivated by what looks good or what their parents tell them to do. But for me, getting my Chef’s Coat, joining the development committee and then the board, these were things I worked for, I wanted for myself, that I’m proud of.” 

Leathers said the difference between students like Addie and those who have been “voluntold,” as she calls it, can be seen in the number of them who stay on. Eighty-five to 90 percent of the students that volunteer at Healing Meals continue with the program, whether they complete 20 hours or achieve 300. Leathers believes that what keeps the students coming back is the direct impact they have on the lives of the people they serve. 

“There aren’t a lot of volunteer opportunities for kids that can provide that,” she said.

“I still remember my favorite story that was shared in circle,” Addie said. “It was about a client who had come to the Healing Meals facility to visit, and she had noticed our wall of hearts, titled ‘Client Wall.’ She had asked if her name would be up there, and she was told to go see for herself. When she had found her name written in a heart, she had broken down in tears. She had felt so loved. In that moment, I really felt my impact. I had played a part in making this woman feel loved, something I never want to stop doing.”

Healing Minds

In addition to regular check-ins, Healing Meals surveys its students about the impact of their experiences. Increasingly, they have reported improvements to their emotional and mental health. In an email to Leathers, one parent wrote of her son, “He has reduced anxiety, reduced stress, increased confidence, increased social interactions and increased trust in others. He has since joined a sport and a club at school with his new-found bravery.”

Leathers sees this qualitative data as too powerful to ignore at a time when the adolescent and young adult mental health crisis continues to confound parents and educators. Indeed, there is ample evidence in the literature as to the benefits of service work on the mental health of young people, particularly through programs like Healing Meals which involve reflection on purpose and meaning.

Additionally, Leathers believes the palpable feeling of inter-generational connection at Healing Meals can be an anecdote to the unprecedented rates of loneliness youth are reporting and Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy deemed “an epidemic.” 

Leathers is confident that as the organization expands to meet the increasing demand for medically tailored meals, the youth development program will grow, too. She has plans to open a new youth program in Hartford, Conn. in 2026 and looks forward to expanding in other parts of the state.

This summer, Healing Meals has launched its first-ever paid internship program for youth leaders who have earned their Blue Aprons. It is informed by the developmental relationship framework of the Search Institute, a youth-serving organization that conducts and applies research to promote positive youth development. As part of the program, Palmer is leading a session on life design that asks students to consider what they value and to reflect on how they want to feel.  Leathers sees the internship program as a pilot where staff and youth leaders are co-creating what they hope will be a more formal version of the iterative model that has helped so many young people grow. 

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

Measuring Mission and Meaning

Posted on by Mollie Ames

What if colleges and universities assessed student flourishing on par with traditional metrics like graduation rates and grade point averages? If they did, would they work to improve the conditions under which students report finding meaning, purpose, and wisdom? Would students and families consider these measures in their choice of college?

A new research initiative from the Human Flourishing Project at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science is providing both the means and the encouragement for these scenarios. The Academic Flourishing Initiative launches this month with an invitation to schools across the country to join a research learning community focused on examining how well their institutions promote conditions that lead to flourishing in college and in life.    

Project leaders argue that, as part of the assessment efforts institutions use to benchmark and improve, colleges and universities should understand how university life is helping students grow in wisdom and judgement and whether they are prepared for leadership, citizenship, and problem-solving in an increasingly complex world.

“Our conventional college assessments are all critical and should not be neglected, but we should also broaden our focus,” said Tyler VanderWeele, director of the Human Flourishing Project and the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “We should consider flourishing both academically and in life more generally. What we measure shapes what we discuss, what we know, and what we aim for.”  

“What we measure shapes what we discuss, what we know, and what we aim for.”

VanderWeele and his team at Harvard define “academic flourishing” as “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of an academic community’s life are good,” including the degree to which institutions help students grow as human beings. It is a focus within the Human Flourishing Program’s longstanding assessment work involving six dimensions of flourishing: happiness, health, meaning, relationships, character, and financial security. It also includes a community flourishing component, which considers, “What does it mean for an academic community to flourish as a community?” This takes into account conditions such as good relationships in the community, proficient leadership, healthy structures and practices, and a shared mission. 

The aim of the Academic Flourishing Initiative is to form a network of schools that participate in assessment and data collection campus-wide, reflect on the data, and learn what institutions can do to more intentionally infuse flourishing into their practices. The heart of the Academic Flourishing Initiative is focused on the individual flourishing of students along with students’ assessment of whether or not their college is contributing to their own formation and flourishing.

Among the assessments available to the institutions is a 24-question student formation survey divided into four themes: knowledge and critical thinking, character formation, citizenship and leadership, and meaning and growth.  VanderWeele said the real innovation within this work is the students’ perception of the contribution of student life not only to their development, growth, knowledge, and critical thinking, but also to their moral foundation, character development, and their capacities for leadership and citizenship.

In acknowledging that assessing institutions’ capacities in these areas holds them accountable for outcomes that many might view as outside their purview, VanderWeele pointed to the mission statements of countless colleges that profess otherwise. A commitment to human-centered education is not only foundational in many institutions but, one might argue, necessary to accomplish more traditional academic outcomes. 

“Even institutions that don’t embrace character formation as part of their mission would arguably find it a necessary part of achieving their cognitive and epistemic goals,” said VanderWeele. “You need a certain level of perseverance to work through difficulties and to push one’s mind. You need a certain level of courage to work through controversial or challenging questions. And you need honesty in test-taking and research practices.” 

As an indication of the widening appeal of this work, four of the questions within the survey were embedded in the Wall Street Journal’s annual college rankings. These four were growth in wisdom, justice, contributing to society, and positively changing the world. While the information won’t be released until the fall, early results show meaningful differences among schools on individual questions within the survey.

VanderWeele was pleased the Wall Street Journal included student formation among the many, more heavily weighted factors in its analysis but said the Academic Flourishing Initiative is more interested in shared learning than competitive benchmarking. Still, the inclusion of formation and flourishing within a widely publicized measure on the comparative value of college says something about what student and families may be yearning for.

To learn more about the Academic Flourishing Initiative, see the Initiative brochure, join a webinar on August 20, or contact Associate Director for Research Brendan Case at brendan_case@fas.harvard.edu or Associate Director for Impact Reece Brown at reece_brown@fas.harvard.edu. 

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

The Toughest Game of Their Lives

Posted on by Mollie Ames

When Alyssa Acompora began her career as a nurse in the intensive care unit, she threw her whole self into the job. As a former Division I swimmer at Fairfield University, that’s what she knew how to do: go all in. But unlike athletics, nursing didn’t offer external validation for her efforts, and before long, Acompora was burned out and considering leaving.

Acompora’s experience as a former collegiate athlete struggling to adjust to life after athletics isn’t unique. Many young adults who wrapped their entire lives and identities around their sport suffer as they attempt to transition to the real world. For that reason, Acompora created “Beyond the Athlete,” a counseling service aimed at helping former athletes discover their new purpose. 

“I thought I could just copy and paste how I operated as an athlete,” Acompora said. “But I was burning out because they don’t give gold medals in life.”

Beyond the Athlete is one of a growing number of similar businesses, especially as athletes of all levels have started speaking up about mental health, helping move the needle in the right direction. With unique challenges, the transition period between end-of-college athletic career and real career warrants a unique solution.

“These athletes face an identity crisis, especially if their careers come to an end by force, which they usually do,” said Derrick Furlow, Jr., chief athletic officer at Onrise Mental Health Care for Athletes. “They’ve been a part of their sport for so long and usually haven’t given thought to what’s next.”

In a world where only two percent of the 460,000 N.C.A.A. athletes move on to the professional level, a sobering number of young athletes are left struggling. 

“I thought I could just copy and paste how I operated as an athlete. But I was burning out because they don’t give gold medals in life.”

While some colleges are putting mental health support in place to help student-athletes adjust, many simply don’t have the resources, especially for those leaving the system. A 2022 survey from the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) reveals that 90 percent of collegiate athletic directors do not feel their institutions provide adequate psychiatric support services for coaches and student-athletes.

Thankfully, former collegiate athletes are emerging to help those following in their footsteps. Their services take on different forms, but all have the same goal: to fill in the gaps that leave former student-athletes struggling as they adjust to a new world. 

Transition issues

When Acompora first began her nursing career, she did everything she could to be the best version out there. No matter how hard she worked, there were no gold medals to validate that effort. 

Like Acompora, understanding that life doesn’t offer external validation like athletics is something Tony Muskett has struggled with, as well. The 22-year-old recently graduated from the University of Virginia after finishing his football career there. “It used to be that when I had a big game, my social media would blow up all weekend,” he said. “Now, if I have a good day at the office, there’s no real acknowledgement. If you can’t find the internal motivation, you’ll struggle.” 

Acompora turned to therapy for help but found her therapists couldn’t relate. “They don’t think in an athlete mindset,” she explained. 

She kept trying, however, and eventually took some of the responsibility on herself, becoming a certified nurse coach, confidence coach, and athlete transformation coach. After eight years, Acompora began to pull out of her spin. “I began to identify patterns and habits of how I was trying to define myself,” she said. “I had to learn to internally validate myself.”

That meant identifying her core values, setting smaller goals and checkpoints, and celebrating herself along the way. This also carried over to her personal life, where Acompora learned to slow down, too. She took up yoga, surfing, and walking, defining consistency differently than she did as an athlete. “I realized I didn’t need to operate at full speed at 31 years old,” she said. “Many athletes feel like everything is a competition and that if they’re not going all out, they’re unproductive or lazy.” 

Muskett, who works in commercial real estate, admitted he was ill-prepared for the real world. He had his sights set on the N.F.L. draft, but injuries his senior year forced him to start thinking differently for the first time in his life. “For 20 years, I was programmed for football,” he said. “When you think about the possibility of life after football, it’s scary.” 

One reason for that, Muskett said, is that as a full-time athlete, you don’t have the time for internships and networking like other college students. Derrick Furlow said that’s a valid concern. “I was a football safety, so I was an anomaly who recognized I probably didn’t have a future at the pro-level,” he said. “I realized I needed to figure things out, so I started looking at the people around me to see who could expose me to other opportunities.” 

Not everyone thinks ahead like that, however, and many get stuck in the grieving process. “For most athletes, the game comes to an end, and its often not by choice,” Furlow said. “They will grieve the game, wish they had done more, and often experience anger about it.”

Jaimel Johnson, an all-American soccer player for the University of Tennessee who went onto a professional career, now works as an athlete mental health specialist at Onrise. “There are a lot of variables when you transition from school to after,” she said. “You’re trying to separate your identity from the field and figure out your value to the world.”

The helpers

In 1991, Brian Satola graduated from the University of Virginia, where he played football. He’s also the father to two student-athletes and has borne witness to how much things have changed. “There’s so much pressure on these student-athletes today,” he said. “Back when I was in school, the final whistle blew, we dropped off resumes, and found a job. Today, athletes are occupied with their sport full time and then must compete for jobs against kids who have done multiple internships and have stacked resumes.” 

During their time at school, these athletes have access to mental health resources. But when they graduate, they lose that structure. “A wall goes up and they’re left to dangle and figure it all out,” Satola said. “Colleges have limited resources to help and can’t provide the breadth of programming needed.”

For this reason, Satola recently helped found LAVA: Life After Virginia, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting U.Va. student-athletes as they navigate this transition. Working in partnership with the school and its athletic director, LAVA focuses on four key pillars: mentorship, mental wellness, alumni engagement, and career transition. “Many of these athletes don’t even know what they want to do after school, so we help pair them with alumni to get micro-internships,” he said. “We also let them hear alumni stories, so that they can understand how to launch a career.”

Satola started with a focus on the football players for now, with hopes that the model will expand to other sports at U.Va. He’s found an advocate in the coach and athletic director, who allow LAVA access to the student-athletes. “Without their support, the program doesn’t succeed,” he said. “The coach is a realist and understands the importance of mentorship and guidance for the players, and we begin offering that support from the start of the recruiting process.” 

Johnson would like to see these conversations begin even before high school. “I think we should get to a point where we start talking about the reality of what happens after sport at the youth level,” she said. 

The LAVA program models itself similarly to “4 For Forever” at the University of Notre Dame, whose intended goal is to support the student-athlete in a holistic manner, including preparing them for life after graduation. A former student-athlete created the Notre Dame program, and like U.Va., works with an external partner, called Life After Notre Dame. 

It was at a LAVA event that Muskett connected with Satola and to his first real job. “I’ve learned that I can apply some of the same principles I learned as an athlete to my career,” he said.

Identifying those assets, as well as what careers might be of interest, is key. “Athletes need to identify what transferable skills they have and what jobs might be good fits for that,” Furlow explained. “What are you good at? What do you do for free time that you enjoy?” 

Over their careers, these athletes have developed many transferrable skills, including time management, leadership, communication, and a hefty dose of confidence. But until someone points this out, they may not recognize how well they can apply those attributes in the real world. “We already possess the necessary skills,” said Alexis Hornbuckle, who played basketball at University of Tennessee and then won a W.N.B.A. championship with the Detroit Shock. “You’ve earned your athletic arrogance, and that comes across as confidence in a job interview. That can win in any space.” 

Conversely, that confidence can sometimes prove tricky. For athletes who are used to existing at the pinnacle of sport, understanding that they won’t be starting out as C.E.O. is a necessary reality check. Beyond the Athlete, Acompora’s organization, offers former athletes one-on-one mentorships to help them strategize a path forward and soon will add a community-focused membership, too. “Our goal is to help students keep the training wheels on for a while as they transition,” she said.  

Members of the Onrise team, including Kim Quigley, Derrick Furlow, and Alexis Hornbuckle, cheer on their shared alma mater, the University of Tennessee. Via Derrick Furlow.

Beyond the Athlete is relatively new, but in a nod to the fact that higher education is beginning to recognize the issues graduating athletes face, the organization is now an official partner of the NAIA. In this capacity, the organization provides mindset coaching, routine optimization, and identity creation. “There’s a growing recognition of the need for these services,” said Acompora. “Schools are learning that they need to care about athletes not just physically and mentally but to help them be well-rounded and prepared.”

Likewise, Onrise provides athletes with mental health specialists like Johnson, albeit in a business-to-business format. “We partner with organizations, and then the athletes can reach out to us without their coaches or anyone else knowing about it,” Furlow said. 

Onrise designed this format so that athletes have no hesitation asking for help. All its athlete mentors receive training in a “transition formula” that they can use with the student-athletes. Hornbuckle is one of those mentors. “In my era, we didn’t talk about mental health,” she said. “You didn’t want to be labeled as crazy. That’s changing, but we still want student-athletes to feel safe navigating this space.”

Hornbuckle added that, as a former athlete, she understands the issues students face, and how hard the end of a playing career can be. “It took me four years to truly retire,” she said. “When I quit, I felt like I was letting people down, and that sent me into a bad spiral.” 

The transition to the real world for student-athlete is highly individual, and all the newer organizations designed to help recognize that. The former student-athletes at the helm are uniquely equipped to understand the challenges the adjustment period presents.

Ultimately, no matter what supports are available to them, the student-athletes must seek out the help and put in the work for results, said Acompora. “They have to be the butterfly to my cocoon,” she said. “I can show them everything you need to transition, but they have to want it, too.” 

Rethinking Work, Meaning, and Education 

Posted on by Mollie Ames

At the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., the question isn’t just what students will do after graduation — it’s who they’ll become, quite consciously. In an age when higher education is often measured by employment rates, St. Thomas is leaning into a different measure of success: whether students leave not just with a degree, but with a sense of purpose. 

Through The Purpose Project, launching this fall, the university is reframing college as a formative journey, one in which reflection, storytelling, and ethical exploration are as essential as more traditional career prep. As the new thinking goes, if all a student takes away from college is an entrée to their first job, they — and the college — have missed the point of higher education.

“I think we fail our students if, when they graduate, all they think college was good for was getting them their first job out of college,” said Christopher Michaelson, professor of business ethics. “But,” he conceded, “we also fail them if we don’t help them get that first job.”

The heart of the new initiative sits in the juncture of that tension between the practical and the profound, at a time when the practical is increasingly under the crosshairs for “return on investment.” Part cultural philosophy, part pedagogical blueprint, The Purpose Project asks a different question than the ones colleges often lead with. The focus is not so much “What career do you want?” but instead “What kind of life are you trying to build?” And then it offers the tools for that blueprint.

From the earliest conception, the project was never meant to be a philosophical silo but a shift in the university’s core culture: a way of weaving reflection and purpose through the fabric of a student’s entire experience. Amy McDonough, chief of staff in the Office of the President, watched this idea take root in the university’s leadership and spread throughout the campus.

“We wanted this to be something that students encounter throughout their time here — not just a one-off retreat or capstone,” she said. “It’s not about putting pressure on students to ‘find their purpose’ in college. That’s too much. Instead, it’s about equipping them to begin the lifelong process of searching.”

The Purpose Project took shape with support from a Lilly Endowment grant and was further strengthened by campus-wide strategic planning, culminating in its inclusion as a priority. University President Rob Vischer allocated institutional support to the initiative, advocating that a St. Thomas education must be more than transactional.

In the process of planning, McDonough and her colleagues began an audit of what was already happening across the university. They discovered that many faculty had been doing work rooted in vocation and reflection. The task then became one of elevation: recognizing that existing work, giving it a common language, and creating a framework that could unify and strengthen it.

Around the same time, a grant through the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University was also awarded to the Office of the Provost to support faculty development around the teaching of virtue and character formation. The initiative focuses on helping faculty explore how virtues such as integrity, empathy, and courage can be integrated into their teaching across disciplines. And it complements other elements of The Purpose Project by reinforcing the university’s mission to cultivate ethical leaders and graduates committed to the common good. 

The touchpoints of The Purpose Project now include a reimagined First-Year Experience course that introduces students to vocational thinking from day one. Sophomore-year retreats, piloted with students from the Dougherty Family College at St. Thomas, are designed to meet students at a mid-college moment when questions of major, direction, and identity converge. For seniors, faculty are working to infuse capstones with deeper reflection on purpose.

Even techniques like storytelling, which might seem tangential to vocation, have been folded into The Purpose Project’s scope. Faculty have partnered with organizations like Narrative 4, co-founded by author Colum McCann and supported by figures like Bono and Sting, to help students tell their own stories. In telling where they’ve come from, students reflect on who they are, who they want to become, and how they want to contribute to the bigger picture. 

“Students come to realize, ‘I can tell my story, and I reflect a little bit about myself.’ And then if you can carry that through, you combine that with what you’re learning and how you want to show up in the world,” McDonough said. 

Still, she was quick to note that the project, with its exercises and skillsets, is meant to feel organic, not imposed. “It’s about recognizing and elevating the work that’s already happening. When you talk to alums, it’s been a distinctive piece of their education,” she said. “This isn’t about adding more to people’s plates. We’re not talking about taking on another minor. This is work that helps you reflect on the rest of your life.” 

A new elective class, designed by Michaelson, the business ethics professor, is one of the most tangible expressions of The Purpose Project. Called “Work and the Good Life,” the course is launching this fall in two pilot sections. The idea had been percolating for years, grounded in Michaelson’s research and personal convictions, as well as research for his book “Is Your Work Worth It?” which explores the intersection of personal fulfillment, ethical responsibility, and professional ambition. The Purpose Project brought together a team of faculty to build the course from the ground up.

Michaelson had long been observing a tension in his students. Many were driven, focused, pragmatic — laser-aimed at securing that first job. But what many lacked, he felt, was space to ask the bigger questions: What is work for? How does it fit into a good life? What responsibilities come with privilege and education?

The course invites students into those questions. Developed with input from faculty across disciplines — chemistry, social work, English, entrepreneurship, and political science — the course is interdisciplinary and intentionally open to students from all majors. One section is dedicated to honors students; the other is open enrollment. But both sections will converge at times for plenary speakers and shared conversation.

Each week, students experience three modes of engagement: a lecture-style session, a small-group discussion, and an asynchronous reflection. Assignments are deliberately experiential and reflective. In one assignment, students interview someone whose job does not require a college degree, seeking to understand motivations and obstacles. In another, they interview a retiree to explore how perspectives on work evolve over time. Throughout, they pursue methods of creating a life path using tools from the world of design thinking, while also building an appreciation of the idea that paths rarely unfold as planned.

The culminating assignment is a letter to a “wise elder”— a parent, mentor, or imagined confidant. In it, students reflect on three fictional job offers, each with its own balance of compensation, passion, and public service. Their task is to justify, in writing, the path they feel drawn to and why. It’s a final exercise in what Michaelson called “asking better questions.”

“I’m not telling students what kind of work they should do,” he said. “I’m helping them ask better questions. That’s the real goal.”

“I’m not telling students what kind of work they should do. I’m helping them ask better questions. That’s the real goal.”

In many ways, the crux of the forward-thinking course lies in a deceptively old-school tool: a physical workbook. Unlike most contemporary digital course materials, this one is tactile. Students write by hand. They fold it open on dorm desks and coffee shop tables. Forming answers this way takes time.

“Research suggests that we learn differently when we actually write by hand,” Michaelson said. “It slows you down. It encourages reflection.” 

The workbook includes single-day exercises and multi-part projects, but perhaps its most endearing quality is its intentional tone. Michaelson likened it to the Dr. Seuss book “My Book About Me,” a fill-in-the-blank childhood journal filled with drawings and declarative statements. (“My favorite food is macaroni and cheese! When I grow up I want to be an astronaut!”)

Michaelson’s own children had copies, and years later, enjoyed the glimpses of their past selves. That’s the spirit he hopes this workbook captures: not to infantilize students, but to offer a keepsake of where they were at this moment in life.

“I hope years from now,” he said, “they look back and say, ‘That’s what I thought I wanted… and here’s what I’ve learned since.’”

It’s all part of the focus on intentional work — with an eye to giving back. While some programs and institutions stress an element of being the best X you can be, St. Thomas, as a school founded in a faith tradition, believes in going a step further and linking your goals towards larger obligation. 

“We don’t say, ‘You can be anything you want to be.’ If you want to be a really good bank robber, well, that might be O.K. in other places, but we’re more judgy than that,” McDonough laughed. “We say, ‘You can be anything you want to be — for the common good.’ It’s also about what you’re bringing to the world. That’s a distinction here.”

Hear Their Voices

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Nichole Hastings called her experience navigating college a “trial by fire.”

As a student with cerebral palsy and autism, she found the small, private institution she chose near home in upstate New York didn’t have a background supporting learners with her disabilities. As a result, she said, her time in school often involved “more advocacy than education.” It was a constant job to arrange and maintain the systems she needed to graduate — to strike a balance between necessary accommodations and room for independence. 

More than 20 years after Hastings graduated, the barriers to getting to and through higher education for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities persist. She now helps run a public speaking course to prepare and promote the voices of current students who, like her, beat the odds and made it to college. The class from the Westchester Institute for Human Development (WIHD) in New York aims to make the path to post-secondary programs more visible and accessible to students of all abilities by elevating real-life stories, while equipping those who tell them with valuable communication and advocacy skills.

Mariela Adams, a program manager at WIHD, which provides resources to people with intellectual disabilities at all life stages, developed the public speaking course, inspired in large part by her experience caring for a son who is nonverbal due to profound autism. 

Her son’s inability to vocalize what it’s like living with his disability has made Adams sensitive to the importance of hearing from those who can. “When I’m working with students,” she said, “there are times when I think if my son could speak, this might be what he would say to me.” 

Adams’ role at WIHD had been to be “an agent of sorts,” she said, identifying and connecting people with intellectual disabilities to speaking opportunities. But as she found herself returning to the same presenters and presentations time and again, she began thinking about how to develop a larger network.

Building a new cohort of speakers by teaching them the communication skills herself seemed like a promising way forward. From tutoring individuals one-on-one, she teamed up with Think College, an advocacy organization for inclusive higher education programs, to develop a group course.

“We just really are connected to that mission that the most impactful way of understanding what it is like to be a person with intellectual disability pursuing a college degree is by listening to them,” Adams said of her alignment with Think College.

Think College’s purpose — to connect students with intellectual disabilities to post-secondary education — stems from a recognition of what the programs can offer them. As of 2022, only about two percent of those with intellectual disabilities who graduated high school were likely to attend college, even though the majority of those who did found competitive employment, higher wages, and mentorship on the other side.

So far, Adams has run the public speaking course twice remotely over the summer for students from all around the country and once in-person for students at InclusiveU, a program for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities at Syracuse University.

Mariela Adams (farthest right) taught a version of her public speaking course at InclusiveU, a program for students with intellectual disabilities at Syracuse University. Via Mariela Adams.

In the ten-session summer courses, students learn to develop their own unique presentation, starting by exploring the audience they want to reach and the topic they’re interested in covering and moving into content development and practicing in front of peers.

The initial classes in which students decide on their subject are key, Adams said, because the more passionate they are about it, the more powerful their presentations are likely to be. “That’s my sort of guiding principle. It’s got to come from where they’re at, what’s relevant to them,” she said. 

The students craft strong messages based on their own experiences. Some have opted to address medical professionals and first responders, while others have targeted parents, educators, or administrators. Students have covered what to know about having a service animal in college, trying to build friendships and social connections, and needing to use a communication device when speaking becomes difficult.

Adams realizes that, while ideally empowering, opening up about these challenges can be anxiety provoking. “I really want to help them see that them sharing their lived experience can lead to significant change,” Adams said. “I also want them to see that they’re giving a lot of themselves, and I want to recognize that — that sharing your lived experience can also put you in a really vulnerable spot.”

One protective measure Adams encourages is for students to find the presentation style that makes them most comfortable, whether academic or humorous, data- or visuals-based. That way, the talks unfold on their terms. 

The group format of the class is also helpful, as students can derive motivation and inspiration from their peers, all tasked with the same challenge.

In general, Adams tries to balance pushing students to move through the scarier parts of public speaking and offering them the support they need. “I think that we can do a lot by teaching students that even the greatest public speakers, they work a lot on their craft,” she said. “It may not feel great when you first start doing it, but you can always get better.” 

Nichole Hastings joined the teaching team as a co-facilitator in part to be a model for students to see that people with disabilities can be successful both in higher education and as advocates and public speakers.

“I can show them that, yes, I’ve been where you’re at. I’ve been through post-secondary education programs as an individual with a disability, and it’s not an easy road, but if you want to pursue it, you can,” Hastings said.

During one summer session, a student with cerebral palsy, like Hastings, arrived at the second day of class and announced, “I can’t do this.” His frustrations with needing to use a communication device, which often prompted people to cut him off or not let him finish his thoughts, had become overwhelming.

“I know what I want to say, but people just don’t let me get out,” the student told Hastings. “They don’t let me be the person that I am because I have to use a device and I have cerebral palsy and they see my physical disability first.”

Hastings assured him that the instructors and students in the class would give him “the time, the space, the respect, everything you need to be able to do what you need to do here.” 

From there, building awareness around communication devices and how to respond to those who use them became the heart of the presentation the student devised and Hastings coached him through.

“The reason why I do what I do and I love what I do is because once people find their voice and they find out how it can be used and how it can be heard, they grow by leaps and bounds,” Hastings said. “I’ve seen it.”

“Once people find their voice and they find out how it can be used and how it can be heard, they grow by leaps and bounds.”

Grace Medina, who is visually and hearing impaired due to a rare congenital condition called Goldenhar syndrome, came to Adams’ course after a previous public speaking opportunity, her first, opened her eyes to her own untapped talents. 

“I was on a panel, and I was super, super nervous, did not think that I could do it,” Medina said. “And then once I got up there, and I had the mic, I was like, ‘Oh, I could do this all day. I love this.’”

At that point, she was a sophomore at Sooner Works, a four-year certificate program at the University of Oklahoma for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities. 

After the panel gig, Medina enrolled in Adams’ speaking course. In the beginning, she found herself rambling off topic while presenting and running out of time before making all her points. Adams helped her organize the content and manage time. 

Medina was also able to pinpoint her preferred communication style, which she said is “more lighthearted and funny” for the sake of audience members, especially those with disabilities who might be easily overwhelmed. 

Since graduating from her program at O.U. in May 2024, Medina has started teaching at a pre-school for children with special needs, while continuing to pursue public speaking and serving as a peer mentor to students in Adams’ class. 

This spring, she was the keynote speaker at a conference focused on inclusive post-secondary education and described the challenges and triumphs of her journey through college, particularly with a service dog, Velvet, by her side.

For Adams, the goal moving forward is to continue supporting former students, like Medina, already on the public speaking circuit, as well as reach new ones perhaps yet to discover a knack for presenting.

While funding changes at Think College mean Adams’ course didn’t run this summer, she’s anticipating another version this fall in partnership with U.I. Reach, a program for students with intellectual disabilities at the University of Iowa.

Adams is also still receiving some support from Think College to develop a guide for other instructors to start their own public speaking courses. They hope the manual will reach directors of post-secondary programs for students with disabilities who can then use it to promote their work. 

After all, Adams said, “there isn’t a better voice to tell about the program than a student that participates in the program.”

Without a Net

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Seven years ago, Sam touched down in the United States, alone. Just 17, she had left her mother and siblings behind in West Africa to live with her father in New England, where he waited with her new green card.

But Sam’s arrival was one of the first and last parts of the move to go as planned. Her father became abusive, and after the pandemic descended, she moved in with a teacher who’d grown worried about her welfare. From then on, Sam’s education became both anchor and bridge to a better life.  

“I got that security from my teachers,” she said. 

College presented another respite from home, although it ended up coming with its own set of challenges, especially financial. From her first day on campus, Sam felt lost. She struggled to make friends in a dominant social culture that seemed to require an entrance fee she couldn’t pay. For her chronic health issues, she could barely afford transportation to appointments, let alone medical bills.  

Every year, Sam said, she wrote letters to the university administration explaining her financial shortcomings and appealing for leniency. The process started to feel dehumanizing, she said, as she found herself trying to prove “my story is sad enough to give me some aid.”

Yet she pushed on, often powered by a simple but effective refrain: “I don’t want to be poor.” Halfway through her first year, she caught a break when she was connected to the Wily Network, a non-profit based in the Boston area that provides holistic support to students navigating college without family assistance. The Wily Network helped Sam cover basic needs and went to bat for her before her last semester when it looked like she wouldn’t be able to make the final payment. 

Sam graduated this May, against all odds, and just in time to avoid some of the added fear students like her are experiencing, as the Trump Administration plans major changes to higher education and related social services. Months of speculation surrounding cuts to federal financial aid and public assistance, the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion (D.E.I.) resources, and the removal of immigrant and international students have left learners already at the greatest disadvantage haunted by the precarity of their situation. As the overwhelming uncertainty continues, it is these students who hang in the balance — those who rely on college for their safety and welfare and are one policy move away from losing it all. 

Keeping It Together

As the executive director of the Wily Network, Judi Alperin King, Ph.D., has had a front row seat to the host of new challenges her students have been managing in recent months.

The ground had always been shaky for those the Wily Network serves, Alperin King said, but at least they knew more or less what to expect. “Now that shaky ground is unpredictable.” 

“You cannot see the cracks in the foundation, and they just keep appearing,” Alperin King said. “Every day there’s a new crack, but it wasn’t in the place you thought it was going to be.”

Earlier this summer, one of Alperin King’s students flew across the country and drove deep into a rural territory, only to arrive and discover the internship that led him there had been cancelled. The work he’d been hired to assist was defunded amid the slew of cuts to federally funded programs, spanning climate and cancer research, foreign aid, and D.E.I. initiatives.

Other students had found out they lost their jobs before relocating for them, Alperin King said. This one hadn’t been so lucky.

With the student’s call alerting them to what happened, the Wily staff spurred to action, trying to figure out how exactly to get him to the airport from an area, apparently, without access to Ubers or even taxis. From there, he would need money for a ticket to Boston, a place to live when he got there, groceries to eat, and income to support himself until school started up in the fall. Without Wily on standby, he might have found himself stranded.

Some developments, like internship-ending cuts to programs and research, are affecting students in real time. Others simply loom, making everyone squirm. 

At any given time, top of mind for students assisted by the Wily Network is whether they’ll continue to be able to pay for college. Concerns have been churning around the fate of federal financial aid since Trump first began promoting the closure of the Department of Education and then signed an executive order to that effect in March 2025. 

Assurances from Education Secretary Linda McMahon that aid would continue didn’t assuage worries, especially as the initial version of Trump’s bill overhauling domestic policy included reductions to the maximum award for federal Pell Grants, which prop up more than six million students with the highest financial need.

This month, the bill that passed Congress and Trump signed into law didn’t include the Pell restrictions that had stoked the most fear, although there are other implications for financial aid. Among them are the elimination of Pell eligibility for students already receiving full scholarships from their institutions, as well as the expansion of Pell to cover shorter-term workforce training programs. In addition, the bill sets limits around the lifetime amount of federal aid students can receive for graduate school and winds down the number of loan repayment plans to two. 

Perhaps raising the most alarm are the law’s cuts to public assistance programs, namely Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps. In 2020, an estimated 3.3 million students qualified for SNAP. But even if the changes don’t impact students directly, a trickle-down effect could. As states look to trim their budgets to fill the new gaps left in health care and food assistance, sector experts have warned higher education could take a hit that cuts back student support services or ramps up tuition costs.

The Trump bill’s changes to Medicaid and SNAP also involve denying eligibility to certain legal residents, including refugees and asylees. These restrictions come on the back of a larger crackdown on noncitizens in the United States.

From a higher education standpoint, these efforts have included the high-profile detention of international students, legally in the United States, targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for their involvement in pro-Palestine advocacy on campus. The Trump Administration has also threatened to bar entry to international students who go to Harvard University as part of an ongoing power struggle with the Ivy League institution.

Any student originally from outside the United States or with family members from outside may be feeling vulnerable. Even Sam, armed with a green card upon arrival almost a decade ago, said she often can’t sleep at night from worrying about her status in the country. Learning about the recent detainment of an undocumented high school student by ICE in the town where she now lives didn’t make her feel better. 

“I think for me, I have always been scared,” she said. “I’m legal. I paid a lot of money to be here, but if you’ve never dealt with immigration before, it’s one hell of a beast.” 

“I think for me, I have always been scared.”

While policy confusion stirs up fear for high-needs students around their ability to stay on campus or in the country, the support services once designed to help them navigate this type of uncertainty are also taking a hit. 

Social worker Jamie Bennett, Ph.D., leads the Fostering Success Coaching Institute, which trains staff at groups like the Wily Network in best practices to assist high-needs students. Through her partnerships with these organizations, on and off college campuses, Bennett has gained first-hand insight into the kind of pressure they now find themselves under. At least two have undergone “mass layoffs,” Bennett said, due to funding cuts.

At a recent event Bennett hosted, free of charge and ironically focused on practitioner wellbeing, she guessed about 20 percent of those she had expected didn’t show. “Either they had lost their job or they were taking on responsibility from colleagues who were being laid off, so they couldn’t join,” she said.

For the most part, Bennett has been able to stave off any fallout for her work. But she imagines cutbacks for her partners could reduce her own services down the road. “That’s going to impact our ability to keep offering as many trainings as we do,” she said. “If they don’t have the funds to send their folks to professional development, they don’t come to us.” 

The Wily Network’s efforts have been affected, as well, as the flurry of cuts to university departments and resources leave even veteran advocates like Judi Alperin King unsure of how to help students. “In some ways, we’ve lost our power,” she said of her and her staff of “coaches.” With boundaries different from those of therapists and mentors, coaches take on wide-ranging tasks, from troubleshooting social problems and locating academic resources for students to acting as the emergency contact they wouldn’t otherwise have. 

“We knew what to do. Not every situation, but a lot of situations, they were predictable, and we could say, ‘Okay, here are the three steps you can take to support yourself through this,’” Alperin King said. Now those steps may no longer apply. 

Although neither Alperin King nor Bennett’s organizations receive federal funding, concerns have still emerged about whether they can completely evade government scrutiny. Both leaders have heard rumors that their group’s nonprofit status, which falls under the purview of the Internal Revenue Code, could be at risk should any of their activities draw higher concern, most likely in relation to the promotion of D.E.I.  

Those warnings haven’t stopped either from maintaining commitments to D.E.I., whether in spirit or explicitly on the company website and other materials. Bennett is firm on upholding her organization’s founding ideals. “We will say what we feel is just and what we feel is aligned with our values. Which are aligned on equity. They’re aligned on inclusion. They’re aligned on everybody’s voice matters.” 

While not overly concerned about her own job security, Bennett does worry about how that kind of stress, combined with increasing student needs, may affect the emotional wellbeing of other service providers. It’s critical, she said, for them to be “well and resourced and feel like they’re equipped to do their work, as they meet with students who have really complex situations and trauma.”

“If we start to see the support of them drop off, then it makes me nervous for what students will start to notice,” Bennett said.

At the Wily Network, one coach has begun to find her background in hospice care unsettlingly relevant to her current role supporting high-needs college students.

“You don’t really coach people at the end of life. You just sit with them, like, ‘Yep, death. Death is death,’” she said. Working with young people facing the unknown where their degree and future are concerned has started to feel like a similar experience.

“It’s more of an existential suffering,” she said.

The same coach has been struggling under the increasing weight of her students’ challenges. Guilt is a dominant emotion, stemming from the understanding she can distance herself from issues surfacing in higher education, from her job, in a way students can’t. 

“I feel like my empathic distress for students is harder to manage because, I mean, what’s going on is hard for me, but I feel like I have a home. I have a job. I have a lot of ‘knowns’ in my life that ballast against what’s going on,” she said. 

Student mental health has always been a prime concern for coaches, but now the uncertainty and fear fueled by real and perceived policy changes seem like the ultimate pile-on for young people already emotionally tested by years of striving and struggling. 

Alperin King knows her students are among the most resilient in higher education. She once used that fact to recruit new coaches, advertising the joys of championing talented students uniquely capable of battling through barriers — all the way to and through college.  

Students without family support who make it to college have a history of defying expectations. People like Alperin King and her colleagues are now asking, “Do we really need to raise the bar?” 

LearningWell used the pseudonym “Sam” and withheld other names in this article due to subjects’ privacy concerns.

You can reach LearningWell reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

A New Way at the Greenway Institute 

Posted on by Mollie Ames

The Greenway Institute is in Montpelier, Vermont, but in theory, it could be anywhere. The start-up engineering school is both a place and a strategy for a radically different way to earn a college degree.  

“We started with the question: How do we make college more affordable and more attractive to a larger set of students?” said Mark Somerville, president of the Greenway Institute and one of its co-founders. “You do it by giving students an experience that is exciting and empowering, that will help them thrive but won’t cripple them financially.” 

Somerville believes that combining student-centered pedagogy with a resource-sensitive business model will bring many more students into higher education at a time when the absence of both is keeping them out. While its doors are not yet open, the Institute has spent three years prototyping a curriculum by which students learn engineering in unconventional classrooms, while working in the community and earning a salary. The goal is for them to graduate debt free and ready to take on the real world. 

As the Greenway Institute prepares to matriculate its first class of students, it holds broad appeal for families, faculty, and communities seeking something more and different from higher education. Its work-integrated learning model is emerging as one of the innovative ways the sector can restore the public’s trust in the value of a college degree, now at a record low. What influence the Greenway Institute has on higher education hinges on its own success, which includes the conviction that, if they build it, the students will come.  

Innovative Roots 

Mark Somerville is no stranger to disruption. He was an early team member and then provost at Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, an award-winning start-up that broke the rules in engineering education with its inter-disciplinary, project-based approach. During his time at Olin, Somerville worked with and helped launch new programs and institutions in the United States and in other countries, including Fulbright University in Vietnam.  

Somerville said his two co-founders, Troy McBride and Rebecca Holcombe, had been working on pieces of the Greenway concept for some time. In 2022, they collaborated with Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and received a grant from the National Science Foundation to consider how to make engineering more appealing to more students by designing a curriculum that involved sustainable thinking as a core competency for every engineer. Greenway’s tag line is “Engineering our Sustainable Future,” but its value proposition involves a wide interpretation that includes an economic component that the Institute now markets.  

“We propose that in the age of climate change, sustainability should be something all engineers are thinking about no matter their discipline,” Somerville said. “But beyond that, we need to be thinking about how to enable people to live well and thrive on this planet.” 

With his background in innovative educational models, Somerville was frustrated at what he sees as higher education’s failure to integrate transformational education with a sustainable business model. This concern eventually led to the work-integrated learning model Greenway is promoting. Its viability involves breaking precedent by making work a central and integrated part of the learning journey: Students receive credit for working — and get support and instruction from Greenway while they are on the job.  

The four-year program involves two years of residential education that are high-touch and heavily hands-on. Greenway adopts a collaborative mastery orientation to learning, focused on process, metacognition, and developing strong relationships with faculty. This is coupled with two years of working at a company, in a credit-bearing, co-op style that lets students earn an average of $50,000 per school year. Well-paid co-ops are not unusual in engineering but integrating them into the academic process is.  

“Even schools that have really strong co-op programs don’t usually allow students to get credit when they are out in the world doing real stuff that matters to people,” Somerville said. 

At the Greenway Institute, students not only get credit for their work but are connected to a faculty member who acts as a coach and mentor throughout their two-years of employment.  

“Students are mastering a whole set of professional and design skills in the workplace that we are able to put educational scaffolding around,” Somerville said. “They are learning more because there is someone there who is helping them do the reflection work, the sense-making that is often missing in apprenticeships.” 

President Mark Somerville addresses students and staff in pilot class. Courtesy of the Greenway Institute.

The out-of-the-box pedagogy is paired with smart economics. As Somerville described it, students are earning money half the time they are in school. They are learning in-person at the school’s physical plant for half the time they are enrolled and distance-learning during the time they are out in the workplace. That set-up drives down the cost of running the institution and, thus, what it costs students to earn their degree.  

For the first classes of students coming to the Greenway Institute, that cost will be zero. According to Somerville, the free tuition is security against an accreditation process that will take until the first class of students graduates to complete, making attending Greenway a risk as well as an opportunity. With confidence in its model, the team at the Greenway Institute sees this and other challenges as just part of what you take on when you’re creating something new. 

Collaborative Pioneers 

Hannah Root had been a middle school science teacher in a rural district of the state when an opportunity at the Greenway Institute made her change course.   

“My classroom was full of hands-on, real-world projects, and we were having a blast,” she said. “But it was really hard to witness how many of these young people didn’t see themselves as pursuing higher education, even though they had tons of skills and lots of promise. I was drawn to the idea of creating a space where students, like the ones I had in my classrooms, could feel like they could succeed.” 

Root wears many hats on the small campus in Montpelier, but her primary focus is helping run the two pilot programs that are part of the curriculum development. In 2023, through a partnership with Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, the Greenway Institute enlisted a group of sophomores to participate in a credit-bearing semester away in Montpelier to pilot the project-based portion of the model. This past spring, another cohort from Elizabethtown participated in the work-integrated learning program. 

Root said the students in the pilot were attracted to Greenway’s hands-on element and the opportunity to help launch a new school. “These were students who knew they weren’t textbook learners,” she said. “They didn’t want to sit through lectures when they could go and build stuff and learn by experience.”  

One of the students was Emanuel Attah, a sophomore and mechatronics engineering major, who interned at Hallam-ICS, an engineering consulting firm near Burlington, Vermont. “I heard a presentation about Greenway in one of my classes, and I was immediately like, ‘I want to be there. This is literally calling my name,’” said Attah, who is from Nigeria. 

Attah said his time in Montpelier prepared him to be “a whole engineer,” able to tackle complex problems but also to interact with colleagues and supervisors and understand how things work in the world. In addition to work and classes, he said he and his peers received a lot of coaching.  

“Before we even got started, we’d discuss basic things like, ‘How are you going to get there? Who is your supervisor? How are you going to ask for feedback?’” he said. “One of the things we did was to define our professional tenets of behavior: ‘How are you going to show up? How are you going to be your best?’”  

Attah recalled fondly the “asset-low” living arrangements the founders designed to teach basic life skills and keep costs low. “We lived on our own. We cooked our own meals. We commuted to work by ourselves. We had an authentic, real-world experience.”  

Attah said the Greenway Institute gave him the confidence to want to stay and work in the United States after graduation. Regarding the financial advantage of earning while learning, Attah said, “It really helped me out. Otherwise, I would have had to work at some other kind of job for like 15 hours a week to help pay the bills.”  

The students aren’t the only ones who are inspired by the Greenway Institute’s innovative model. Annick Dewald is a founding faculty member at Greenway. The Smith College graduate worked briefly at Boeing before going to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to receive her doctorate. There, she helped design high altitude, long endurance solar aircrafts for earth and climate observation missions. Before coming to the Institute, she worked at an aerospace start-up, where she managed a team of 14 interns tasked with building a 30-meter wingspan aircraft.   

“That start-up experience, plus working closely with students, is what drew me to the Greenway Institute,” she said. “I saw the advantages of working at a small space, where you get a lot of responsibility, you get a lot of different experiences, rather than a really clear job description and a very narrow focus.”

Dewald described her experience working with students in the spring pilot of 2025 as highly collaborative. “The community we built was really, really strong because we were all co-creators, so we broke down the hierarchy of faculty and student, where we were all on first-name basis.”  

Dewald said equity in education is something all Greenway staff care deeply about. The key elements of the Institute’s model reflect that sentiment, starting with a framing of engineering as collaborative and altruistic which may attract more women and people of color into a field from which they have felt excluded. The professional development scaffolding students receive will help first-generation engineering students succeed. And cracking the affordability nut will help make engineering education, indeed all of higher education, more accessible — or so goes the plan. 

For those who are cheering for the Greenway team, there is ample proof of concept. Since 2020, Somerville’s colleague and advisor, Ron Ulseth, has been running a similar work-integrated program at Iron Range Engineering in Minnesota. A partnership between Minnesota North College and Minnesota State University, Iron Range also connects students with paid, supervised internships, project-based learning, and a similar professional support system.  

Iron Range differs from the Greenway Institute in that it is for community college students who are majoring in engineering. Students spend a total of nine semesters, first in community college, then in Iron Range’s academy and boot camp, where Ulseth said they “learn how to be an engineer.” For their last two years, they are out working in engineering co-ops, getting paid and also earning credit toward their degree. 

Ulseth said that earning money and learning how to navigate the workplace help address the barriers that lead students towards worst-case scenarios, like leaving college with significant debt and no degree.  

“Earning money and learning how to navigate the workplace help address the barriers that lead students towards worst-case scenarios, like leaving college with significant debt and no degree.” 

“Many of our people were disadvantaged in their ability to continue their education given the structures that exist, be it racism, socioeconomic issues, or fill-in-the-blank,” said Ulseth, who recently stepped down as Iron Range program director.  

Iron Range has achieved A.B.E.T. (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) accreditation and was recognized as “an emerging world leader in engineering education” in a 2018 report by M.I.T. These distinctions are important benchmarks for the Greenway Institute, as it seeks its own accreditation and the financial backing that will help it get there. Meanwhile, the team continues to develop its signature curriculum and is beginning to market the new institution to students and families. It may not be for everyone, but given the thirst for change in higher education, the Greenway Institute may well be a concept whose time has come.