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Lilly Endowment to help prepare students for lives of worth and service

By Nancy J. Ashmore
December 6, 2002

"If I could do anything I wanted, is this the work I would do? Is this the way I was meant to serve? Is this the place I should be?"

St. Olaf College students, faculty, staff and alumni will be asking themselves those questions -- and acting on the answers -- thanks to a recent grant of nearly $2 million from Lilly Endowment Inc. The grant, announced Nov. 25 by St. Olaf President Christopher Thomforde, will enable the college to launch a multifaceted program of vocational deliberation and preparation called "Discernment of Lives of Worth and Service" in the fall of 2003.

The award to St. Olaf was one of 39 grants made by the endowment to four-year liberal arts colleges for programs designed to prepare a new generation of leaders for church and society. Other Minnesota institutions that received grants were Hamline University in St. Paul and the College of St. Benedict in Collegeville, Minn.

The funds will underwrite a variety of initiatives at St. Olaf, including: · the creation of courses in which students deliberately engage the subject of vocation; the integration of vocational mentoring into all forms of advising: academic, spiritual and career; experiential learning opportunities, including off-campus internships, summer Bible camp work, service learning abroad and on-campus work with an annual Luther Theological Seminary intern, for those considering ministry as a vocation; Lilly Vocational Scholars, faculty members who research, write and publish on the theological consideration of vocation; and Faculty Vocational Scholars, who teach strategies and the spiritual implications of working within specific academic disciplines or career paths.

Alumni and staff will serve as mentors to students and oversee hands-on learning experiences. They will also be served by the program, which will sponsor annual gatherings focused on vocation and career-and-life-balance retreats on and off campus.

"Examining the relationship between faith and occupational choice is a natural expression of the identity of St. Olaf as a college of the church," says Thomforde, who noted in his inaugural address in 2001 that "the light of the sacred enables us to see human work as vocation."

Being called to the ministry is only one choice in preparing St. Olaf students for lives of worth and service, Thomforde says. "We also encourage St. Olaf graduates to become lay leaders in their own spiritual communities. We hope to encourage all members of the St. Olaf community to reflect systematically on how we may direct our lives so that we are better able to make the right choices for ourselves and for the world."

Bruce Dalgaard, director of the college's Center for Experiential Learning, will oversee the project. The author of three books and more than three-dozen scholarly articles, he joined the St. Olaf faculty in 1992 as the Husby-Johnson Chair in Business and Economics. He stepped down from that role last year to help launch the Center for Experiential Learning.

"The Lilly Endowment grant will allow us to advance already stated goals, but to be more intentional and expansive in what we do," says Dalgaard. "It will enable us to engage students on many different levels and at multiple points in their time here, beginning with their first semester on campus. Our hope is not only to get them thinking about where they want to go in their lives, but to get them going there."

Dalgaard will coordinate a leadership team consisting of the faculty directors of first-year programs and the ethical issues curriculum, leaders of spiritual, academic and career advising and the directors of outreach programs in alumni relations and lifelong learning.

"St. Olaf alumni rise to the top of their chosen professions, whether they are in medicine, law, business, education or the arts," notes Paddy Dale, director of the Office of Government and Foundation Relations, who helped write the grant proposal. "It is imperative for the larger welfare of society that these leaders engage their occupations with an active sense of vocation."

Founded in 1937, the endowment is an Indianapolis-based private foundation that supports its founders' wishes by supporting the causes of religion, community development and education. The 39 recent grants, totaling $76.8 million, are part of a foundation initiative called Programs for the Theological Exploration of Vocation.

Over the course of the initiative, the foundation invited or received proposals from more than 400 of the 550 schools eligible for the awards, noted Craig Dykstra, endowment vice president for religion. "The result," he says, "is a wonderful amalgam of creative programs that are clearly well-thought-out and have a real chance of success."

St. Olaf College, a national leader among liberal arts institutions, fosters the development of mind, body and spirit. It is a residential college in Northfield, Minn., and affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). The college provides personalized instruction and diverse learning environments, with nearly two-thirds of its students participating in international studies.

Contact at 507-786-3315 or @stolaf.edu.