The Educating Character Initiative, a project of the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University, was founded in 2023 through the generous support of Lilly Endowment Inc.
What’s New at the ECI
- 📆 Join us April 17 at 4pm ET for our next webinar webinar in our Cultivating Communities of Character in the University Webinar Series: Lessons from Three Educating Character Initiative Grantees
- 🎥 Watch our last webinar in the series: Relationship and Reflection: The Foundation for Individual and Organizational Transformation. Find additional webinar recordings on our Resources page.
- 🏆 Dr. Glenn Sanders of King University Recognized as Nathan O. Hatch Leader of Character
- 🎉 Congratulations to our 2025 Teacher-Scholar Grant Recipients.
- Are you attending other character-focused conferences or institutes? Share them with us at this link. There, you can see where the ECI Team will be, too. We’d love to help you connect with fellow ECI Community members for in-person gatherings across the country.
Our Goal
The Educating Character Initiative aims to equip a wide range of public and private institutions of higher education—including, but not limited to, major research universities, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, military academies, minority-serving institutions, religiously affiliated colleges, and single-gender colleges—with the resources, funding, and support needed to integrate character education into their distinctive institutional contexts, curricula, and
cultures. The broader aspiration is to foster a robust network that recognizes the value of educating character within higher education.
Since our launch, we have welcomed over 1,200 faculty, staff, and administrators from more than 500 institutions and organizations to join a broad and diverse community with a common purpose: educating and building communities of character in higher education and beyond. If you’re a faculty or staff member working in higher education and interested in joining our community, tap or click on the button below:
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Building Capacity to Cultivate Character
In addition to organizing workshops, conferences, and convenings and developing resources for faculty and staff, the Educating Character Initiative awards grants to both individuals and institutions. In the 2024 grant cycle, ECI awarded over $17.8 M to individuals and institutions engaged in efforts to strengthen the understanding, integration, and education of character at
U.S. colleges and universities.
In 2025, funding for institutions will include Institutional Impact Grants of between $100,000 and $1,000,000 as well as Capacity-Building Grants of up to $50,000. Successful grantees will be teams of faculty, staff, and administrators at U.S. colleges and universities with outstanding proposals for developing the moral, civic, and/or intellectual character and capacity of faculty, staff, and students. Funding for individuals is available through Teacher-Scholar Grants of up to $15,000, which may be used to support research on character or character
education in undergraduates or to develop resources that strengthen the capacity to educate character at the grantee’s institution or in the larger network.
Support
The Program for Leadership and Character is delighted to have the opportunity to expand its impact through the Educating Character Initiative. We are deeply grateful to Lilly Endowment Inc. for its commitment to this vision, as well as to Wake Forest University for its unwavering support of the Program.