Here is this week’s news of grants or gifts to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.
Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, received $1 million grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to fund the establishment of the Public Theology and Racial Justice Collaborative at the Vanderbilt Divinity School. The collaborative will seek to train the next generation of religious leaders to think theologically about racial justice. The effort will be under the direction of Emile E. Townes, dean of the Divinity School and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society. Professor Townes is the author of Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2006). Dr. Townes is a graduate of the University of Chicago and holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University.
Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Morgan State University in Baltimore are sharing a $300,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to fund the Urban Health Media Project. The initiative will train high school students to use journalist skills to produce news stories, videos, and to use social media to educate their peers on important health issues. The goal of the project is to reduce racial health disparities. The principal investigator for the grant project is Yanick Rice Lamb, an associate professor and chair of the department of media, journalism and film at Howard University. Professor Yanick is the co-author of Born to Win: The Authorized Biography of Althea Gibson (John Wiley & Sons, 2004). She is a graduate of Ohio State University and holds an MBA from Howard University.
Historically Black North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro received a $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to establish the Center for Advanced Transportation Mobility. The center will be under the direction of Maranda E. McBride, an associate professor of management at the university. She holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in industrial and systems engineering from North Carolina A&T State University. Dr. McBride also earned an MBA at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
