June 2026

Project support for the Endeavor Lab Collaborative has moved from Sterling College to Randolph College.

Beginning June 1, 2026, all emails and other communications, including the newsletter, will come from:

lcollinshall@randolphcollege.edu
AND
elc@randolphcollege.edu

To Avoid Missing Important Grant Communications, PLEASE be sure these are in your contacts.

◇ We want to express our deepest gratitude to Sterling College and its leadership for serving as the founding home of the Endeavor Lab Colleges project. Your unmatched faith in the power of this collaboration has laid the groundwork for everything we do today.

Dear Colleagues, Students, and Friends,

For nearly a year, this newsletter has arrived in your inbox on the second Thursday of the month. As we wrap up this inaugural year, I want to take a moment to thank all of you who read and contribute to it.

In December 2025, we conducted a survey asking for your ideas on how to improve our content. You expressed a strong desire to hear more about what is happening on other campuses. With your support, we have expanded our content from one monthly spotlight to three, sharing inspirational stories from faculty, staff, and students that highlight your thought leadership and the impact of your well-being work across our ELC campuses. Without you, the work of the Endeavor Lab Colleges (ELC) would not be possible.

We hope that over the past year, this newsletter—alongside the incredible dedication of our Endeavor Fellows, taskforce teams, and leadership—has helped advance the culture of well-being on your campuses by providing:

• examples of well-being support, programming, and curricular innovations;

• professional development opportunities and resources;

• access to free tools and applications you can implement at your institutions, and

• regular updates on the work of the Endeavor Lab College Collaborative.

We have a busy summer planned! We will be updating our website and newsletter to reflect the critical advances we made over the 2025–26 academic year. Alongside this work we will increase access to resources and toolkits you can quickly implement, a wide array of professional development partnerships, and funding opportunities to help expand the visibility of your work, thought leadership, and support conference presentations.

We look forward to sharing much more with you in our next newsletter in September 2026.

If you have ideas for the coming year, stories that highlight the incredible work happening on your campus, or would like to access funding to support a presentation of Endeavor-related work at a regional or national conference, please reach out to me at ELC@randolphcollege.edu.

Be well,

Lori

Read Barbara’s Praxis post: RISE@Bennington College

Barbara Alfano is completing her first year as Associate Dean of Advising and First-Year Forum (FYF) at Bennington College after serving as the Director of FYF since 2021. Prior to serving as Associate Dean, Barbara was a faculty member in Cultural Studies and Language for seventeen years. Throughout her career, Barbara has centered the first-year course in project-based learning, enhanced student leadership by offering students a more prominent role as peer leaders, and expanded collaborations with the local community. Barbara is a native of Italy, and before moving to the United States in 1999, Alfano worked in Naples as a journalist and translator. She specializes in 20th- and 21st-century Italian fiction, with a focus on women’s writing, representations of America, issues of identity, love studies, and ethics and literature. She is the writer of The Mirage of America in Contemporary Italian Literature and Film (University of Toronto Press, 2013) and the co-editor of Italian Quarterly’s special issue, “Projecting Americanism Abroad: Italy in the Cold War” (2019). Her essays have appeared in Italica, Forum Italicum, Oblio, Quaderni d’Italianistica, and Romance Studies, among other journals. She curated Stanford’s Arcade literary salon on Elena Ferrante. In 2009, she published her first collection of short stories in Italian, Mi chiedevo. 

Barbara has also served as Co-lead of the Endeavor Lab College’s Curriculum Working Group, alongside Randolph College’s Gary Dop, since its inception in January of 2024. As co-lead she has provided invaluable leadership and supported the working group in the development of the 9 dimensions of well-being, the Presidential Endeavor Faculty Fellows program, drafting of “Framing Well-Being & Whole Person Education in the Liberal Arts,” and related curriculum mapping of well-being related skills and courses across the Endeavor Lab Colleges.

Check out Mark’s Praxis post: Reorienting the First Year Around Flourishing at Blackburn

Dr. Mark Hopper is a counseling psychologist and professor whose work connects positive psychology, vocation, and liberal arts education at Blackburn College. He has taught for more than two decades at colleges including Loras, Wisconsin–Platteville, and Hawai‘i–West O‘ahu, earning his Ph.D. from Ball State University. His work has been recognized internationally through presentations at the International Positive Psychology Association World Congresses in Vancouver (2023) and Brisbane (2025), where he shared research on student flourishing and vocational development.

At Blackburn, he helps students connect psychology to purpose and leadership within the nation’s only student-managed Work Program. His scholarship explores how higher education can cultivate flourishing through alignment between strengths, values, and authentic contribution. Mark also serves as Blackburn’s Endeavor Presidential Faculty Fellow and a member of the Curriculum Working Group. In his Fellow role, he has been instrumental in the College’s curricular redesign, including the development and implementation of a First-Year Experience, building from his role as a Faculty Fellow. His work has also supported curriculum mapping of well-being related skills and course across the Blackburn curriculum, leading to a rethinking of their general education curriculum around the question of more fully integrating student flourishing alongside academic success over the coming year(s).

His involvement with the Endeavor Lab Colleges and NetVue extends this work, helping the college design curricula and systems that link academic learning, vocational reflection, and institutional well-being. Outside of academia, Dr. Hopper has lifelong interests in composing and recording original music. Across his teaching, research, and creative work, Hopper seeks to help students and institutions discover how education can become an act of purpose and flourishing.

Check out Hien’s Praxis piece:
Liberal Arts Education, Earnings, and Financial Well-being

Dr. Hien Nguyen is the Cody van Heerden Chair in Economics and Quantitative Social Sciences at College of the Atlantic (COA). As a feminist political economist, Dr. Nguyen researches how normative sex/gender institutions generate economic disparity and reproduce structural inequality, especially for gender and sexual minorities. Their recent publications include empirical work on gender-affirming care and transgender mental health, as well as economic experiments on gender expression and care work.

At COA, Dr. Nguyen teaches courses in microeconomics, macroeconomics, and political economy, emphasizing the interplay between money and power while building students' capacity for quantitative reasoning and radical socio-economic imagination. They also serve as the Endeavor Presidential Faculty Fellow and member of the Curriculum Working Group. As a Faculty Fellow, they bring expertise in interdisciplinary research methods and critical economic analysis to the ELC Curriculum Working Group, contributing to curricular integration of well-being frameworks that honor diverse conceptions of flourishing beyond individualistic models.

If you know someone or a program at your institution that you would like to be highlighted, please contact ELC@randolphcollege.edu. 

Understanding Motivation and Procrastination

Tuesday, June 30, 2026 | 1:00 - 2:00 PM ET

Almost everyone procrastinates sometimes. But if you continue to put things off, then regret it and feel bad about yourself afterward, it’s easy to get caught in a cycle that can have a negative impact on your physical & mental health. Explore the reasons why people procrastinate, and learn techniques to help yourself and your students to get and stay motivated in this one-hour seminar. 

The ELC has partnered with Mindspring Mental Health Alliance to offer free resources to our community. While we will periodically host some synchronous and asynchronous webinars in collaboration with Mindspring, you can access a complete list of their upcoming webinars, including some great summer and parenting resources on their Webinar and Events Page.

The working groups have wrapped up their work for the year and are finalizing their annual reports for the Endeavor Foundation. Some working groups will continue to meet over the summer, and others will resume their work in the fall.

Returning Reminder - at a recent trip to College of the Atlantic, I learned that many staff there are currently paying for yoga and meditation apps and would like access to one for free at home or on the go. 

I suspect many of you missed it in the kickoff addition of the newsletter or the busy (September) start of the term so we are bringing this information back around to help you and your communities get four years free access to Down Dog for all members of your community. What better time to start than now!

As part of their mission to make wellness accessible, Down Dog offers free accounts to students, faculty and staff at primary, secondary, and higher education institutions. Higher ed students and faculty can enjoy up to four years of free access—just sign up with your .edu email address.

How to Get Started:

Visit Down Dog for Universities to check if your school is already enrolled.

If not, submit your school’s information—Down Dog will verify accreditation and add your school’s domain to their list.

Once verified, anyone with your school’s email domain can sign up directly through the app for extended free access.

⚠️ Important: The verification form does not create your account. You must download the app and sign up using your verified .edu email to activate your access.

Start your wellness journey today with Down Dog!

Share your favorite wellness app or resource by emailing ELC@randolphcollege.edu. We will share it in future newsletters.

Join the ELC Wellness Movement!

Invite Colleagues to Subscribe to the Newsletter.

Highlight your practice, pedagogy, and reflections on your wellness work in Praxis or News story shared with ELC@randolphcollege.edu.

Join the Knowledge Base and Share Resources with others in the Collaborative.

Connect with your campus liaisons or the Project Director.

Support the work on your campus!