Calvin Awarded Grant for Virtue Formation and Community Engagement
Ask Calvin graduates about their education, and one word seems to emerge: formative. If you look at the institution’s foundational documents, it’s not hard to figure out why. From its Expanded Statement of Mission to its Educational Framework, Calvin University is clear about how it intentionally prepares learners.
“When we talk about education, we are talking about forming the whole person,” said Noah Toly, provost. “If we stop with what we know or what we can do—it doesn’t matter what anyone’s job is after that or how much they earn, if we stop at that metric, we’ve failed. The education we offer is about who we are.”
On July 11, 2025, the Educating Character Initiative (ECI) at the Program for Leadership and Character (with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc.) awarded Calvin University an ECI Institutional Impact Grant in the amount of $488,000 for its proposal Forming Virtue through Community-Engaged Learning: A Proposal for Educating Character at Calvin University. This three-year project provides Calvin the opportunity to take what’s deeply rooted in its ethos of virtue formation and connect it more intentionally to strengthen both longstanding and emerging programs.
“Through scholarship, curricular and cocurricular experiences, and commitment to fostering relationships, Calvin has been a leader in the thought and practice of character and virtue formation in Christian higher education,” said Kevin den Dulk, associate provost. “This grant now facilitates a more intentional approach to connecting the dots between what we teach and write about and what we do in practice.”
According to the proposal, the primary aims of the grant are twofold: first, to build a critical mass of Calvin faculty and staff with competence in a community-engaged approach to character education; and, second, to engage various interested publics—both in the community and across academic networks—in opportunities for mutual learning about the approach. And this will happen through funding faculty and staff learning, developing courses and cocurricular opportunities, providing faculty time to reflect on and disseminate their work in ways they haven’t been able to do in the past, and nurturing community partnerships.
A few prime examples of a community-engaged approach are community nursing, Calvin’s most mature area for community-engaged learning; sustainability efforts through Plaster Creek Stewards, another long-standing initiative that encompasses multiple disciplines and perspectives; and, more recently, the Wayfinder program, an undergraduate experience for barrier-facing adult learners who explore concepts of calling and civic life through the study of the humanities.
“By connecting community-engaged learning with character formation, this grant helps us to enhance each and make that good work legible to the rest of the world,” said Toly. “We are also looking forward to learning with and from our community partners, to cocreating opportunities for character education, and to joining the broader conversation that the ECI network will bring together.”
Beginning in August 2025, the grant project will focus on building institutional capacity through establishing learning opportunities and an Office of Community Partnerships. In 2026 the aim will be to provide more opportunities for faculty and staff to begin workshopping ideas for community-engaged learning.
Both Toly and den Dulk emphasize that while there will be a lot of learning happening on campus and alongside community partners, the grant project will also focus on providing Calvin faculty and staff the space to disseminate best practices in virtue formation more broadly.
“We have an opportunity through this grant, for example, to give Mary Doornbos and Gail Zandee time to write and engage with the broader public on the work they’ve been doing all these years in the community nursing program,” said den Dulk. “We’ve been doing this work for a long time, but it’s been hidden under a bushel.”
