$8.5 Million Awarded for Student Well-being Initiative
Blog written by Sterling College Communications, September 2025
Sterling College is proud to be among a national group of colleges selected to receive funding from the Endeavor Foundation in support of its groundbreaking work to enhance student mental health and well-being.
With the generous support of the Endeavor Foundation, Sterling College will continue to:
Integrate well-being into both academic and co-curricular programming
Build sustainable, trauma-informed models of community care
Launch a virtual Center for Purposeful Life & Work
Reimagine campus maps to foster greater belonging
Connect students to the natural world through NatureRx programming
These efforts aim to create lasting, systemic change in how liberal arts colleges support their students—preparing them not only for meaningful careers, but for lives of connection, resilience, and purpose.
The grant award launches Phase 2 of the Endeavor Lab Colleges consortium, a group of 10 small liberal arts colleges that have been working on student well-being since 2023.
With this new support, Sterling College and its partner schools will build on and implement pilot projects launched in the first phase, scale successes, and deepen cross-campus collaboration. The goal is to make long-term improvements that put student well-being, belonging, community care, and purpose at the heart of the college experience.
“We are thrilled to move to the next phase of this vital work,” said ELC Project Director Dr. Lori Collins-Hall. “Thanks to the dedication of our partner institutions and the confidence and commitment of Endeavor Foundation, we are taking meaningful steps to address well-being on our campuses. Our goal is not simply to improve mental health but to transform the way liberal arts colleges engage students in caring, resilient, mission-aligned communities.”
The Endeavor foundation has committed to investing more than $8.5 million to support the ELC project, including $5.22 million over the next three years for Phase 2.
Over the last two years, Endeavor provided $3.275 million to the colleges for exploration and development of innovative pilot projects exploring relationships and opportunities to enhance students’ mental health and well-being through the liberal arts curriculum, developing connections to place, connecting purpose and career readiness, and creating caring and resilient communities.
Endeavor Lab Colleges include:
Antioch College, Yellow Springs, OH
Bennington College, Bennington, VT
Blackburn College, Carlinville, IL
College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, ME
Prescott College in Prescott, AZ
Randolph College, Lynchburg, VA
St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD
St. John’s College, Santa Fe, NM
Sterling College, Craftsbury Common, VT
Warren Wilson College, Asheville, NC
“Collaboration across colleges is enormously difficult, but it holds enormous opportunity for realizing shared goals and catalyzing renewal in service of what students need to persist and thrive,” said Ashley Kidd, VP and Director of Programs at Endeavor Foundation. “In Phase I of this grant, the Endeavor Lab Colleges demonstrated what working together can achieve, developing a truly inclusive model of engagement and commitment to their shared goals. In a time of challenge and change, Phase 2 of this grant offers a hopeful, collaborative path forward for students and the future of higher education.”
Phase 2 will continue to collaborate with ELC campus communities to implement activities developed across five central initiatives – establish program sustainability, widely document and disseminate information, and pay particular attention to liberal arts institutions.
“This grant reflects Endeavor’s longtime commitment to liberal arts education,” said Isabel Roche, Executive Director for Special Programs in Higher Education at Endeavor. “The liberal arts empower students to see themselves, others, and the world with greater clarity, compassion, and hope. This project brings the liberal arts vision for education of the whole person into sharper focus, putting student flourishing at the center. In doing so, it reaffirms the transformative power of the liberal arts for both mind and spirit, preparing students for every dimension of life.”
Five central initiatives in Phase 2 are interconnected and mutually reinforcing in their aims of placing student well-being, belonging, and purpose at the center of each student’s liberal arts experience.
Led by a working group with faculty from each ELC institution, the Cultivating Curricular Review and Innovation initiative invites curricular innovation across and within institutions. It considers and connects what the liberal arts teach about the human condition and experience, integrating concepts and skills related to well-being into the curriculum, co-curriculum, and teaching.
Building Models of Community Care and Resilience focuses on creating a scalable, trauma-informed, strengths-based model of community care and resilience centered on the whole person, liberal arts, and well-being that meets the urgent needs of students, faculty, and staff at small resource-constrained liberal arts colleges. This initiative is reimagining how colleges can embed community care into curricular, co-curricular, and workplace structures to support mental health, well-being, and human flourishing through sustainable, community-based curricula and practices.
Center for Purposeful Life and Work is a virtual, interactive, student-centered ecosystem that offers scalable, evidence-informed programming, self-guided tools, faculty/staff resources, and cross-institutional engagement. The Center will serve as a hub for exploring values, identity, career pathways, and well-being. It will empower students to articulate and pursue purposeful lives and careers during college and beyond.
Mapping Belonging represents an innovative and powerful student-centered approach to fostering well-being, engagement, and resilience by reimagining campus maps as immersive tools for connection to place, history, nature, and community. Rather than serving solely as instruments of navigation, these dynamic physical and digital maps help students orient themselves within the cultural, ecological, and social landscape of their campus.
Nature Rx and Nature-Based Programming are aligned with the Mapping Belonging initiative to help students identify and connect with the green and blue spaces across their campuses, recognizing the enduring relationship between nature and human well-being, rooted in long- standing practices of healing and connecting to the land. This initiative explores ways to integrate both active and reflective engagement with the natural world in the daily lives of students and the broader campus community.
Small liberal arts colleges cultivate relationships and foster community, buffering students from isolation and loneliness, and emphasizing a strong sense of belonging. These campuses nurture students’ passion, balance, integrity, vision, and collective responsibility, preparing them for wise and ethical stewardship of their world.
About the Endeavor Lab Colleges
With Endeavor Foundation financial support, the national collaborative of small liberal arts colleges is working to advance student mental health and well-being and institutional resilience. Through shared innovation and collaboration, the Endeavor Lab Colleges (ELC) are committed to holistic student development, based on the shared belief that well-being is essential for lifelong success. Visit the ELC website to learn more.
