UPIKE receives Mellon Global Citizenship Program grant
0Staff Report
The University of Pikeville recently received a grant from the Mellon Global Citizenship Program of the Salzburg Global Seminar to support global citizenship education. Grants are awarded to members of the Appalachian College Association (ACA) and select Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU).
A member of the ACA, UPIKE is partnering with Lincoln Memorial University, an ACA school, and Fisk University, an HBCU, to expand the institutions’ study abroad programs and encourage more students and faculty to become global citizens.
The institutions view study abroad as a key component to the globalization of their campuses. The visit will coincide with each university’s international week efforts in the fall of 2015, the specialist will visit with each campus’ administration, global education offices, committees and students.
“We are excited to be working with Lincoln Memorial University and Fisk University to expand globalization efforts on our campus,” said Paul E. Patton, chancellor and interim president of the University of Pikeville. “By our universities working together, we can offer more study abroad programs to our students, share faculty exchange and strengthen the atmosphere of global citizenry.”
Grants are made possible through the support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and are part of the Mellon Global Citizenship Program (M-GCP) launched in 2014 to deepen and consolidate the successful global citizenship education work initiated with 36 partner institutions. The M-GCP is the outgrowth of the multi-year Mellon Fellow Community Initiative, which ran 2008 to 2013. The MFCI enabled these institutions to move toward becoming sites of global citizenship and it laid the foundation for new models of multi-campus collaboration.
The institutions will be supported in their efforts to expand collaborative activities, demonstrating the powerful value-added impact of cooperation among ACA and HBCU institutions and build the case for creating an independent organization to support ongoing joint projects and initiate new collaborations.
This phase of the M-GCP comes at an exciting time for global learning and global citizenship at higher education institutions. Over the last decade these concepts have become part of the higher education mainstream, being recognized in the U.S. and abroad by many organizations such as the American Association of Colleges and Universities with its Global Learning agenda and UNESCO, which has named global citizenship education as one of the strategic areas of their education program.
The first round of grants includes support for Visiting Specialist Series whereby a global citizenship education expert will visit multiple schools to meet with faculty, administrators and students; Study Away Incentive Programs whereby multiple institutions will coordinate on a shared domestic ‘study away’ experience; an Undergraduate Research Conference; and a Global Citizenship Summit. The M-GCP will provide another round of grants in the same areas for 2016.