Educating Character Initiative: 2025 Project Brief
The Educating Character Initiative (ECI) strives to catalyze a movement for character education at colleges and universities across the United States. Through our work in grantmaking, collective learning, and community engagement, we equip institutions of higher education with the funding, resources, and support necessary to integrate character into their distinctive institutional contexts, curricula, and cultures.
Our broad aspiration is to enable institutions of higher education to become communities of character that form students, staff, and faculty to act with character and for the common good.
All of our work begins with an invitation to join in a shared project, to be in a community committed to a common effort. Building a movement for character in higher education involves weaving together individual contributions into something beautiful. The fabric of our community is formed by individuals and institutions who draw upon their own traditions, cultures, missions, programming, and practices. As a whole, the ECI Community is emerging as a rich tapestry of partnerships, ideas, and opportunities for educating character.
The Character of Our Community
We aspire to be a community that lives out its values with integrity, courage, and hope. Our core commitments are:
Hospitality
We strive to foster a welcoming community, characterized by openness, presence, and reciprocity. We aim to establish rhythms of friendship and belonging, making space for new voices and ideas in conversation.
Humility
Character education is for all but not one-size-fits-all. Character is formed not in the abstract but in the concrete circumstances of institutions and communities. Context matters. We are committed to creating spaces where we can learn from and with each other about how to educate character across a wide range of settings in higher education.
Common Purpose
Educating character involves orienting individuals and institutions toward common goods – goods that lend stability, rootedness, and connection to one another. Locating, identifying, and naming these goods gives us an aspirational ideal and direction to guide our shared work.
The Shape of Our Work
Together, we seek practical answers to challenging questions as we build a movement for character education in higher education:
- How can colleges and universities help students become people of character?
- How can we help our institutions become communities of character?
- How can individuals and institutions collaborate to shape a culture of character formation across the landscape of higher education?
Our Programs
Our work operates across three primary lanes of activity: grantmaking, collective learning, and community engagement.
| We have awarded over $35M in grants to a wide range of public and private colleges and universities, including major research universities, liberal arts colleges, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, faith-based institutions, and community colleges. Visit our grantmaking page to learn more about this programming lane. |
A Listening Tour
In 2025, our team facilitated a community listening tour to better understand what is working well among ECI grantees, identify challenges, and gather suggestions from relevant stakeholders for the continued development of the Educating Character Initiative. Here are a few of the many threads emerging from these conversations:
- Character education is not triage. Institutions share a clear and stable commitment to educating character in a way that is relevant, though not solely reactive, to current political and cultural needs, tensions, and complexities.
- Small groups are building a movement. Institutional teams are organizing for change through both sustained cohorts and newly-formed, small working groups. These groups are driving institutional change and are emerging as the foremost formative space across projects.
- Centering students deepens and extends the effort. Some of the most exciting efforts involve teams who are centering students in their efforts, not merely as a target of formation but as partners and collaborators in program development.
- Building institutional capacity is slow, careful work. Contextualized character-building efforts require sustained effort in building institutional commitment and capacity. This work takes time, depth, and patience to build the relationships and structures to educate character wisely and well.
- Character education moves beyond the surface. Institutional teams are working to ensure that their efforts are not mere box-checking or “virtue-signaling” exercises. Project teams are showing willingness to go below the surface to form students at their core.
An Emerging Orientation
Through engagement with the larger ECI Community, the Educating Character Initiative team is ready to name an emerging orientation to character: Character for Wholeness.
Educating character forms people with deep, enduring dispositions that structure how they think, feel, and act in pursuit of what is good.
Character-building efforts influence
- our perceptions and patterns of attention, thought, imagination, and reasoning;
- our motivations, cares, and commitments;
- our feelings and emotions; and
- our ways of being and acting in the world.
Educating character enables us to live fully and completely with and in community; to live an undivided, unified, and integrated life, both individually and with others; and to become individuals who heal, restore, and repair the wounds that affect our individual and communal lives. Forming good character keeps us from living fragmented lives, from living with division, discord, or disintegration individually and collectively, and from causing or ignoring the brokenness within and around us.
In short, character education shapes persons and communities for greater wholeness.
| Coming soon: more resources for Character for Wholeness and a Character Project Wheel resource and instruction guide. |
What’s on the Horizon?
Communities of Impact
Our next phase involves efforts to empower ECI Community-driven initiatives. In 2026, we will begin launching communities of impact, each composed of members from multiple institutions, united by a shared concern or interest, who seek to deepen our understanding while expanding our capacity to educate character. We are interested in hearing from you about particular communities of impact you’d like to join or cultivate. Have an idea? Send it to eci@wfu.edu.
A Community Platform
To become a catalyst for transformative change at universities and beyond, we are building a platform capable of meeting the needs of a growing movement. In 2026, we will launch a Character Commons Platform designed to host accessible and practical resources for character education. The platform will also provide scaffolding for connection and community building, shared research projects, and a way for philanthropic organizations to find and fund innovative programs.
An Invitation
We are excited and grateful to see beautiful work happening across the ECI Community as teams, institutions, and cross-institutional collaborations infuse character programming in a wide range of contexts. Together, we’re working to become communities of character that shape students, staff, and faculty and transform our institutions for the common good.
Catalyzing a movement for character education across higher education is a common project that requires depth of thought, commitment, and relationship. It requires a community.
Members receive a monthly newsletter featuring stories about the good work happening across our community, along with access to events, resources, funding opportunities, and more.
We invite you to join our community, not only for what you might gain but for what you might offer. We need you for this work. And we look forward to learning with and from you as we strive together to become people and communities of character.
