The Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University

What’s New

Educating Character Initiative announces 2024 Capacity-Building Grant Recipients! The ECI has awarded 41 grants of up to $50,000 to institutions seeking to educate and embed character in their distinctive contexts of higher education.
🩺 The Program for Leadership and Character is pleased to announce two requests for proposals open to employees of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine and Advocate Health. The application window for the “Character in Medicine Grant” closes August 2024, and the application window for the “Character in Health Systems Request for Partner Proposals” closes August 2025.
📣 Join us for our major conference, Educating Character Across Differences: Cultivating Communities of Character in the University, December 5-7, 2024, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC, hosted by the Educating Character Initiative (ECI) on behalf of the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University.
❗️Jesmyn Ward—author, professor, and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient—will kick off the conference as our keynote speaker.

Receive regular updates on events and happenings:

Our Mission

The Program for Leadership and Character inspires, educates, and empowers leaders of character to serve humanity. Through innovative teaching, creative programming, and cutting-edge research, we aim to transform the lives of students, foster an inclusive culture of leadership and character at Wake Forest, and catalyze a broader public conversation that places character at the center of leadership.

Over the last decade, Wake Forest faculty have become leading experts in the study of character. The Program for Leadership and Character is now using this groundbreaking research to develop creative, liberal arts-based programming to transform the lives of our students.

We are excited to share who we are and what we aspire to do. We hope you will join us in this effort.