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.
Historically Black Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, Florida, has received a pledge of more than $8 million form the city of Jacksonville for renovations to a campus dormitory and for the establishment of an athletics field on campus.
Elizabeth City State University, the historically Black educational institution in North Carolina, received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to establish mobile library information centers that can be set up in various locations on campus and in the community to make people aware of the services that the university’s library provides.
Georgia Southern University in Statesboro received a $1.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to support the university’s Advanced Nursing Education Workforce project. The program seeks to increase the number of nurses who work in rural and underserved areas of southeast Georgia that have large Black populations.
Historically Black Tuskegee University in Alabama, received a two-year grant from the U.S. Department of Defense that will enable the university to conduct historical and genealogical research on Tuskegee Airmen who are unaccounted for. The project is under the direction of Godfrey Vincent, an associate professor of history at the university.
Pennsylvania State University received a $373,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study how the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee used geography and geospatial intelligence to determine the best sites to hold civil rights protests and demonstrations in the 1960s.
The University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, a historically Black educational institution, received a $70,000 grant from the Arkansas Economic Development Commission to support junior and senior STEM majors at the university who are participating in the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation. The grant will also provide funds for a pre-college summer institute.
The National Science Foundation has given out a five-year $5 million grant to the Virginia-North Carolina Alliance, a consortium of nine colleges and universities that seeks to boost the number of students from underrepresented groups who pursue degrees in STEM fields. The alliance was created by the University of Virginia and includes George Mason University, Piedmont Virginia Community College, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia Tech, Bennett College, Elizabeth City State University, Johnson C. Smith University, and Saint Augustine’s University. From 2007 to 2010, Blacks earned 1,158 degree in STEM fields at member institutions. From 2013 to 2016, the number increased to 1,574.
