5 Lessons on Cultivating Communities of Character from our 2025 ECI Webinar Series
Each month, the ECI hosts a webinar to help our community better understand how character is shaped and sustained in specific contexts. In 2025, we completed two series: “Cultivating Communities of Character in the University” and “Character For, With, and In Community.” Moderated by our Senior Scholar of Character, Aaron D. Cobb, the lectures brought together diverse perspectives on how communities can cultivate wholeness, reciprocity, care, justice, and hospitality, and how character can be intentionally developed through community. Below are five central themes that emerged from these 2025 conversations:
1. Patient listening and relational trust are essential for lasting institutional change.
Character formation in universities is gradual, cultural work that depends on trust, humility, and mutual care. “The currency of change is trust. Change can only go as fast as there’s trust to actually sustain and build it. How do we build trust? I think that takes a lot of relational work,” said Michael Lamb, Senior Executive Director of the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University, during “Questions of Character: How to Build Institutional Capacity and Empower Faculty and Staff.”
Caring builds trust and involves attentiveness, responsibility, meeting others where they are, and reciprocal vulnerability. “We look at caring as not being so much a caring for as it is a caring with—we meet people where they are and walk alongside them to help them get to where they need to go,” reflected Kimara Ellefson, National Director of Strategy and Partnerships, Kern National Network for Flourishing in Medicine during her webinar, “Advancing Flourishing in Health Professions Through the Interdependent Concepts of Character, Caring and Practical Wisdom.”
2. Character work must be rooted in each institution’s mission, history, and context.
The type of character education that students need at each institution is determined by the challenges they currently face geographically, economically, societally, and historically. The student body at any institution faces different challenges depending on its context. The ECI encourages the community to explore those contexts and approach their own character education frameworks in relation to that institutional history, geography, and economic and societal situation. “I think there are just so many ways that thinking about where we are and who we are and where we’ve been can bring rich context to the way that we think about character,” explained Jennifer Rothschild, Executive Director of the Educating Character Initiative, during “Questions of Character: How to Build Institutional Capacity and Empower Faculty and Staff.”
For example, the staff and students at Fort Lewis College in Colorado are using their grant to confront their institution’s history. “We had a history as a federal Indian boarding school, which was character education in a really malicious way of imposing a certain ethnocentric character upon a group with the goals of character erasure, cultural erasure,” said Paul DeBell, Associate Professor of Political Science at Fort Lewis, during the webinar, “Creating Capacity to Educate Character: Lessons from Two Educating Character Initiative Grantees.” “We proposed a program called ‘Character Building Conversations about Reconciliation.’”
3. Shared vocabulary emerges through listening and application, not philosophical authority.
Common language about character develops from shared goals and practical experiences, not strict theory or terminology. Teams found language matters; “character” can alienate or connect. They adapted vocabulary and prioritized questions. DeBell offered a more effective entry question:
“One thing that can be hard… is when you go to a colleague… and start talking about the project, they can really get boxed out by the word ‘character.’ So we said, ‘Why do you do the work that you do? What is the difference: how are people different before and after your program?’ And that kind of perspective turned out to be the magic key.”
Glenn Sanders, Director of Christian Formation and Leadership at King University, agreed. He offered this example on shared language across units: “Our nurses talk about pillars, and our education people talk about dispositions, but we found a ready alliance in that process, and it’s made it much easier in those particular areas.”Lamb and Rothschild had a similar discussion during their webinar about terminology and getting people on board with the character education process. “All these ways that involve seeking common ground, meeting people where they are, and trying to prop them up, support them there, and validate the things that they want to do, I think really move the work forward,” said Rothschild.
4. Empowering faculty and staff starts with recognizing their agency and creativity.
System-level change starts by meeting institutions where they are and amplifying what already works. Faculty and staff are willing and capable when they feel ownership, support, and trust. Kern National Network for Flourishing in Medicine doesn’t drop in a packaged “program;” instead, it partners with systems, honors context, and uses its framework to deepen existing efforts and gradually shift culture. “Where we have found success thus far has been to erase the idea that this is a program or an initiative and to find out instead what they’re currently doing that they believe is working, where they see their gaps being, and we start to work with them around how we could help enrich what they’re doing,” Ellefson reflected during her webinar about flourishing in health professions.
“Our first goal was really to landscape what’s going on already about reconciliation and what is the intersection with character education,” Debell explained about the work at Fort Lewis. “There were already so many things happening, so many conversations happening across campus.” Through their landscape analysis, DeBell and his team realized it was more impactful and community-driven to team up with pre-scheduled events and add a character lens than to produce their own events. Showing up as partners strengthened the community bond.
5. Strong relationships are at the heart of building a culture of character.
If you have trust, shared vocabulary, an understanding of context, a mutual respect for each other’s agency, and a shared purpose of forming character for the greater good, then you might have created a community of character. Some institutions call these groups Communities of Practice, some name an institute or program to encapsulate the group of people who come together for this shared purpose.
The University of Notre Dame has the Institute for Social Concerns, which its Executive Director Suzanne Shanahan described in a webinar as “an intellectual community, but also as a community of friendship and of mutuality. For us, the work of justice is not something that any one of us can do alone. And so we lean into the idea of co-creation of both knowledge and programming.”
At Arizona State University (ASU), Communities of Practice (CoPs) are central to character formation. CoPs build character literacy, relationships, and shared practices. During her webinar, Cristy Guleserian explained, “Shared leadership, practice, and learning are key for communities of practice… people join because they’re intrinsically motivated by common interests.” Guleserian was previously Executive Director of Principled Innovation at ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation; she is now the Executive Director in the College for the Program for Leadership and Character here at Wake Forest University.
“What makes a Community of Practice different from a Working Group is the intentional focus on relationships and on that shared learning and leadership and the practices that we do together as a community,” Guleserian reflected.
