Grant renewed for vocational center

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By The Quad City Times | Thursday, June 29, 2006 11:49 PM CDT | () comments

John Schultz/QUAD-CITY TIMES Augustana College graduate Courtney Anderson, left, and Allison Thompson, a youth director in LaGrange, Ill., lead a group of elementary school children in song and dance toward the end of their day during a recent day camp at Longfellow Elementary School in Rock Island. The Center for for Vocational Reflection at Augustana, which is running the camps, is funded by the Lilly Endowment grant and this camp specifically is paid for with a grant from Thrivent Financial for Lutherans.

Augustana College has received a grant of $500,000 from the Indianapolis-based Lilly Endowment to support continued operation of the Augustana Center for Vocational Reflection.

Established in 2002 with a grant of $2 million from Lilly Endowment, the Augustana Center for Vocational Reflection offers programs designed to help students consider ways their skills, gifts and talents meet the needs of the world.

Dr. Bob Haak, director of the Augustana Center for Vocational Reflection, or CVR, said the center’s initial focus has been to raise awareness of the concept of vocation throughout campus. With renewed support from the Lilly Endowment, he said the center will continue existing programs as it works to fully integrate conversations about vocation into Augustana’s core mission, particularly through its role in a new senior capstone project.

The capstone project will challenge students to carry out a research, service or creative project which demonstrates competence in their major field of study while at the same time reflecting on the role their work has played in serving the wider community.

“Our role is to develop a campus community of faculty, staff and students who recognize their skills, gifts, talents and passions and develop those gifts in response to the needs of the community,” Haak said. “We want to help people actively tell the story of who they are and how they have been called to serve.”

The center’s programs range from course development grants for faculty seeking to infuse the concept of vocation into the classes they teach, to sponsorship and coordination of experiential learning opportunities, such as service-learning and internships. In addition, the center provides advising and support for students exploring careers in the church. Additional information on the center’s programs is available at www.augustana.edu/vocation.

The grant will support the CVR through 2010, when its funding will be fully absorbed by the existing college budget and through endowment funds to be established during the period of the renewal grant.

Through an initiative called Programs for the Theological Exploration of Vocation, Lilly Endowment has provided more than $217 million in funding to 88 U.S. colleges and universities to help deepen students’ understanding of vocation and to support students who discern a calling to full-time ministry in the church.

Students who work with the CVR ran a great program last week that involves day camps at three neighborhood locations near Augustana — Ericsson Elementary, Moline, Longfellow Elementary, Rock Island, and Broadway Presbyterian Church, Rock Island. One of the six Augustana students leading the day camps is Eric Janssen, who has has directed a volunteer mentoring program at Broadway for the last two years.

Another CVR program also underway this summer has seven of our students serving internships at the prestigious M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Interns range from pre-med students to accounting and philosophy majors who are working in a wide range of areas (medicine, management/administration, ethics).