Wake Forest University’s Educating Character Initiative (ECI) will expand its support for character education at colleges and universities across the country with more than $30 million in new funding from Lilly Endowment Inc.

The ECI has built a community of educators from more than 400 higher education institutions engaged in developing and implementing ideas for integrating character education on their campuses. The new funding will add $10 million to the Institutional Impact grants awarded by the ECI this year and provide $20 million to fund and support another round of grants to institutions in 2026.

“This new grant will enable us to continue to build upon the work of colleges and universities that are striving to expand the role of character education at their own institutions,” said Jennifer Rothschild, the director of the ECI.

The next round of Institutional Impact grants will help expand a nationwide movement to cultivate character in higher education, built upon the work of the Program for Leadership and Character, of which the ECI is a part. Since its founding in 2017, the Program has focused on transforming the lives of students by creating a campus-wide culture that lives out Wake Forest’s motto: Pro Humanitate. As the Program has grown in size, scope, and impact, it has sought to support other institutions as they developed and strengthened their own character education initiatives. Since it was launched in 2023, the ECI has distributed $35 million in grants to institutions.

See this year’s grant recipients.

“This extraordinary vote of confidence provides support for the Educating Character Initiative through the end of the decade and affirms Wake Forest’s leadership at the forefront of this critical movement.”

Wake Forest University President Susan R. Wente.

In addition to awarding grants, the ECI has built connections with hundreds of faculty and staff from colleges and universities through monthly webinars, convenings, and one-on-one consultations and calls. A portion of the new funding will go toward staff and other resources to support the ECI’s administrative and outreach efforts, including conferences, convenings and consultations.

“Lilly Endowment’s founders firmly believed that character formation is essential to the flourishing of individuals, families and the larger society,” said N. Clay Robbins, Lilly Endowment’s Chairman and CEO. “We are gratified to see increasing interest from colleges and universities across the country in deepening their own work in character education, and we are pleased to be able to help them do so. More than ever, it is imperative that a new generation of morally and ethically grounded leaders is educated to rebuild trust and enhance civic engagement in our country and world.”

The Role of the Educating Character Initiative

The ECI seeks to foster a community of higher education institutions which, like Wake Forest, have a deep desire to bring a focus on character development into the lives of their students. After its inception in 2023, the ECI began offering webinars, convenings, site visits, and other resources for those institutions that wanted to educate character in their own contexts. In December 2024, the ECI hosted a major conference at Wake Forest, “Educating Character Across Differences,” with more than 350 attendees. Author and MacArthur Fellow Jesmyn Ward was the keynote speaker. The next conference is planned for 2026.

In addition, ECI scholars and staff have provided hundreds of hours of direct consultations with faculty, staff, and administrators. Those efforts were recently profiled in the first in a series of articles from LearningWell magazine, which detailed the ECI’s role as the builder of a community—and movement—focused on character in higher education.

The first request for proposals in 2024 attracted an extraordinary amount of interest. The ECI expected 30 to 40 proposals for its flagship institutional grants. It received 139. The quality and diversity of ideas led to an additional commitment of support from Lilly Endowment. In all, the ECI awarded $17.7 million in grants in 2024. This year’s applications have also exceeded expectations. 170 institutions applied. “Many institutions are focusing their efforts on projects to grow character not only in their students, but also on their campuses and beyond,” said Rothschild. “This new support from Lilly Endowment will allow for a more immediate impact across the country this year.”

In addition, $20 million of Lilly Endowment’s funding will support a third round of grants in 2026, as well as an extension of staff and resources to support all ECI community members. These funds will help build and sustain the momentum of this emerging national movement in higher education. In less than two years, the ECI community representing more than 400 schools has grown to 1,600 faculty and staff. The colleges and universities represent 13 percent of all institutions of higher education in the country, including public universities, HBCUs, tribal colleges, and more. ECI has also given grants that support 146 institutions. The ECI’s goal is for its grant-funded institutions to reach 600,000 individuals by the end of 2029.

“We now see an opportunity to facilitate connections among faculty and staff at a broad array of higher education institutions in addition to their connection to the ECI,” said Rothschild. “We are eager to move from an initiative for the community towards a community-driven initiative. We at Wake Forest are humbled by the opportunity to help others plant the seeds of character education, and we all benefit as those efforts continue to grow.”

How The Program for Leadership and Character Works

The Program was the idea of Wake Forest president emeritus Nathan O. Hatch, who sought to build upon Wake Forest’s founding ideals to educate students “of good character.” Michael Lamb, the Program’s executive director, was hired in 2016 and, during the next two years, sought to further develop an existing network of faculty, staff, and students who were interested in integrating character education into their courses, their departments, and their lives.

Building on a foundation of influential character scholars at Wake Forest, supported by organizations such as the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, Templeton World Charity Foundation, and others, the University received $3.4 million from Lilly Endowment in 2019 to expand the Program. That funding enabled Lamb and a growing staff to fund stipends for faculty on campus to integrate leadership and character into their courses, as well to support student programming, departmental initiatives, scholarly research, and regular conferences. After the success of the “Character in the Professions” conference in 2021 and previous success integrating character into Wake Forest’s Department of Engineering, the Kern Family Foundation provided $8.6 million in funding to expand the Program’s efforts in Wake Forest’s School of Law and School of Medicine, led by Kenneth Townsend.

With the support of a 2023 grant from Lilly Endowment, the ECI committed $23 million to enhance and expand character education at colleges and universities nationwide. Another $7 million in grant funding is supporting the Program’s efforts at Wake Forest through the end of 2027. The Program and others in the Wake Forest community have also raised support to fund additional faculty and staff, as well as full scholarships for a select group of students, known as Leadership and Character Scholars, who work closely with Program staff over the course of their education at Wake Forest.

The approaches are varied, but many efforts are based upon several of the “Seven Strategies for Educating Character,” which were developed by Lamb and others as a way to help students develop more than a dozen virtues, including courage, humility, honesty, integrity, compassion, and empathy. The strategies allow for a thoughtful, not prescriptive, approach to educating character in an ongoing manner. “These strategies offer a framework for deep reflection, habituation through practice, and continual engagement with ideas about what it means to live a good life,” said Lamb. “This work requires intentional and sustained effort from both educators and students. Put another way: there are no shortcuts to character education.”

The impact has been both deep and wide-ranging: the Program facilitated almost 65,000 engagements with students, faculty, staff, and others from 2020 through 2024. “There is a strong desire for this work across campus,” said Lamb. “The effort to educate character—to help people develop the virtues needed to flourish and help their communities flourish—takes an extraordinary amount of time, resources, and commitment. We remain grateful for the ongoing partnership of foundations, institutions, and individuals who have supported this work, as well as those who see this work as a core part of who we are at Wake Forest.”

“At a time of change in higher education, a desire for leaders of character and integrity remains a constant,” said Wente. “We’re proud that Wake Forest has been a leader in a movement toward educating character not only on this campus but on campuses nationwide.”