Hollins has received grants from two organizations focused on improving student outcomes at Hollins and following graduation. In September 2024, Hollins received a $60,000 Vocation Across the Academy Grant from the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE) to invest in integrating principles of vocational discernment and career management into coursework and cocurricular activities. The grant will support the first three years of Hollins’ Scaling Vocation Across the University initiative, a new program combining contemplative discernment with active, purposeful engagement in career development.

The program includes The Career Toolkit: The Purposeful Career and The Purpose Course, which are both designed to immerse students in vocational exploration and reflection. The hybrid, team-taught Purpose Course is the capstone of Hollins’ comprehensive approach to vocational discernment and the university’s new general education CORE program, launched in the 2023-24 academic year. Hollins will supplement the NetVUE funding with an additional $30,000 in donor funds in the second and third years of the project. For the fourth year, to ensure project sustainability, Hollins will allocate $25,900 in institutional funds. To learn more about how the programs are benefiting students, see page 32.

A two-year, $30,000 grant from the nonprofit Come to Believe (CTB) Network, also received last fall, enables Hollins to study the viability of instituting CTB’s innovative two-year college model, which is intended to provide low-income students with greater access to higher education and complete an associate’s degree with little or no debt. Collaborating with CTB, Hollins has created a design team of stakeholders across a range of Hollins departments and perspectives to participate in virtual retreats facilitated by CTB and visit other colleges where the two-year model has been implemented.

This spring, the design team will perform a thorough analysis to evaluate Hollins’ capacity as a potential host institution for a new two-year college. Hollins joins The Catholic University of America (Washington, D.C.), Saint Mary’s College (Notre Dame, Indiana), and the University of Detroit Mercy (Detroit, Michigan) in CTB’s 2024 design grant program cohort.

Both the NetVUE and CTB grants intersect with the objectives of Transforming Learning, Transforming Lives: The Levavi Oculos Plan, Hollins’ strategic plan that is reshaping the course of the university’s future and opening an array of opportunities for the campus community. Approved unanimously by the Hollins Board of Trustees in the fall of 2023, Transforming Learning, Transforming Lives offers an energizing direction for the university.

“Now more than ever, we are called to prepare our students for a multiplicity of unscripted future challenges, while also ensuring that our learning environment allows all students to persist, thrive, and succeed during their college education and beyond, especially those who have been historically marginalized,” says Hollins President Mary Dana Hinton.