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.
Florida State University received a $1 million grant from the Koch Foundation for a research program on the reentry of incarcerated individuals into society after completing their prison terms. The research will focus on identifying the most effective methods and programs to ensure these individuals have the best chance of success upon release. The research will be conducted with prison inmates in Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and Pennsylvania, all states with a high percentage of African Americans in their prison populations.
Tuskegee University, the historically Black educational institution in Alabama, received a $8.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for research to determine why certain diseases affect Black and other minority populations more so than for Whites. The project will also seek to develop targeted community education programs to reduce health disparities. The grant program is under the direction of Temesgen Samuel, a professor of pathobiology at Tuskegee’s College of Veterinary Medicine.
Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, received a four-year, $1,930,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its Mellon Partners for Humanities Education Project. The program will provide for 12 postdoctoral positions at four partner schools for Ph.D. graduates of Vanderbilt. Three of the four partner schools are HBCUs: Tougaloo College in Mississippi, Fisk University in Nashville, and Tennessee State University.
Yale University received a $1 million grant from the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation to conduct research in health care disparities in cancer care and support. The Cancer Disparities Firewall Project will seek to eliminate barriers that hinder cancer patients from underserved populations from getting the necessary follow-up care.
Historically Black Spelman College in Atlanta received a donation from the estate of Alison R. Bernstein that will be used by the Women’s Research and Resource Center at the college to reformat audio-visual materials from the archives of feminist writers Audre Lorde and Toni Cade Bambara. The late Dr. Bernstein was a member of the Women’s Center’s National Advisory Board prior to being appointed in 2010 to the William and Camille Olivia Hanks Cosby Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Spelman.
