Initiatives
The Endeavor Lab Colleges Collaborative is proud to spearhead five innovative initiatives, funded by Endeavor Foundation, aimed at driving systemic and institutional transformation in mental health and well-being for our students and campus communities. These initiatives represent the most promising outcomes from the first phase of our work, and affirm our commitment centering holistic mental health and well-being at the heart of the liberal arts educational mission. Continued support to embed and sustain these efforts marks a significant step forward in our strategic vision. Each initiative serves as a vital spoke in our work to integrate traditional clinical and reactive approaches with proactive, whole person models that intentionally cultivate well-being, resilience, belonging, and purpose throughout the liberal arts experience.
Cultivating Curricular Review and Innovation
Invites curricular innovation across and within institutions to cultivate curricular review and invite curricular innovation across and within institutions, to consider and connect what the liberal arts teaches about the human condition and experience, and to integrate concepts and skills related to well-being into the curriculum, co-curriculum, and teaching.
Community Care and Community Resilience
Focuses on building, advancing and institutionalizing shared, evidence-informed framework for campus-wellness, resilience, and belonging. This initiative is reimagining how colleges can embed community care into curricular, co-curricular, and workplace structures to support mental health, well-being, and human flourishing through sustainable, community-based curricula and practices.
Virtual Center for Purposeful Life and Work
Aims to develop and implemente an interactive, student-centered ecosystem offering scalable, evidence-informed programming, self-guided tools, faculty/staff resources, and cross-institutional engagement. The Center will serve as a hub for exploration of values, identity, career and life readiness, and well-being, and will empower students to articulate and pursue purposeful lives and work during college and beyond.
Mapping Belonging
Represents an innovative and powerful student-centered approach to fostering well-being, engagement and resilience by reimagining campus maps as immersive tools for connection to place, history, nature, and community. Rather than serving solely as instruments of navigation, these dynamic physical and digital maps help students orient themselves within the cultural, ecological, and social landscape of their campus.
Nature Rx and Nature-based Programming
Aligned with the Mapping Belonging initiative, this intitiative expands programming to help students identify and connect with the green and blue spaces across campus, recognizing the enduring relationship between nature and human well-being, rooted in long-standing practices of healing and connecting to the land. This initiative also explores ways to integrate creative and contemplative practices, through active and reflective engagement with the natural world, into the daily lives of students and the broader campus community.