Project Pericles awarded $900,000 from Mellon Foundation for new initiative, Curricula for Social Change: Empowering College Faculty, Students, and Communities for Voter Engagement

​The Mellon Foundation awarded $900,000 to Project Pericles for a new initiative supporting faculty to integrate voter education and social justice issues into humanities curricula through deliberative dialogues and community-initiated projects. The three-year initiative, “Curricula for Social Change: Empowering College Faculty, Students, and Communities for Voter Engagement,” will support more than 200 faculty and expand our reach beyond our 29 Periclean member colleges and universities. 

​The initiative will support more than 50 colleges and universities across the country, with a focus on campuses serving historically underrepresented groups. By incorporating academic content with civic issues students are passionate about, this initiative will transform the lives of hundreds of faculty, thousands of students, and more than 50 communities by empowering them with the skills and resources necessary to build a more inclusive and equitable society. 

The initiative takes a four-pronged approach to strengthen curricula through programs that center voter engagement and civically engaged inclusive pedagogy. All four complementary components of the initiative involve the Periclean Voting Modules, a free online set of curricular resources for faculty across disciplines to incorporate nonpartisan civic and voter education into their courses (www.projectpericles.org/voting-modules).   

The four components are:   

• Civic Engagement Courses with Community Collaboration: Fifty-eight faculty in the Periclean consortium will receive a $4,500 award to develop, teach, and evaluate a new humanities course that includes a community-initiated project and integrates voter education through deliberative dialogue discussions about a relevant civic issue. The courses will address one or more of society’s grand challenges: Climate Change, Economic Justice, Education Access, Immigration, Mass Incarceration, Public Health, Race and Inequality, and Voter Engagement. This program builds upon the successes of Project Pericles’ Periclean Faculty Leadership (PFL) Program in the Humanities, which Mellon funded with a grant for courses taught (2020-2023). 
• National Voter Engagement Faculty Fellowship: Project Pericles will launch a new program, the “Periclean Voter Engagement Humanities (PVEH) Fellowship,” awarding 75 faculty from across the country with a $1,000 grant to use and develop new Periclean Voting Modules in a humanities course. The PVEH Fellowships are open to faculty at higher education institutions, with a focus on reaching community colleges and minority-serving institutions. 
• Mini-Grant Program Addressing Voter Suppression and Challenges to Voting Rights: College faculty and staff will each be awarded a $1,000 grant to use and develop new Periclean Voting Modules with the goal of educating students about voter suppression and empowering them to combat it on their campus and in their communities.  
  The Mini-Grant Program is open to faculty at higher education institutions, with a focus on reaching community colleges and minority-serving institutions.  
• Resource Expansion Project A new resource expansion project will capture the work of the faculty involved in these programs and add these replicable resources to the Project Pericles website and online curricular databases. This will make the work of contributing faculty available to professors throughout the world.  

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Jan R. Liss, Executive Director of Project Pericles commented, “Higher education has a critical responsibility to empower students with the skills necessary for making a difference in society. We are excited about ‘Curricula for Social Change: Empowering College Faculty, Students, and Communities for Voter Engagement,’ which institutionalizes civic and voter education into the curriculum—a goal that is central to the Periclean mission and vital for sustaining our democracy.” 

Project Pericles shares with the Mellon Foundation the goal of supporting the humanities and the liberal arts in long-term sustainable ways and clearly demonstrating their relevancy in addressing real-world concerns. We deeply appreciate our partnership with the Mellon Foundation. We look forward to continuing this important work that is transformational for campuses across the United States, their communities, and higher education more broadly.    

About Project Pericles: Project Pericles is a not-for-profit organization that encourages and facilitates commitments by colleges and universities to include social responsibility and participatory citizenship as essential elements of their educational programs. Founded in 2001 by Eugene M. Lang, Project Pericles works directly with its member institutions, called Pericleans, as they individually and collaboratively develop model civic engagement programs in their classrooms, on their campuses, and in their communities. Project Pericles works to incorporate civic engagement and social responsibility in areas including curriculum and faculty development, research into best practices, and student engagement. In addition, Project Pericles works with faculty from more than fifty colleges and universities.