• Current Story
• Past Stories

Feature

Humanities Institute Wins Grants for Free Minds Project, Begins Endowment Campaign

Last year, the Humanities Institute invested most of its remaining new program development fund — allocated in 2003 by former Liberal Arts Dean Richard Lariviere — to launch the Free Minds Project, an intensive, humanities-based adult education program that offers Austin-area adults living on low to moderate incomes a chance to fulfill their intellectual potential, "jumpstart" their college education, and increase their confidence and empowerment in every aspect of their lives. Committed to increasing the University’s accessibility and responsiveness to communities traditionally underserved by higher education, the Institute gambled that the Project would be successful enough in its first year to attract sustaining support from foundations and individual donors for year two.

That gamble has paid off, thanks to the exceptional effort and achievement of the first Free Minds graduating class and the generosity of three local charitable foundations. The Webber Family Foundation has awarded the Humanities Institute $15,000 to help defray the instructional, materials, and student support costs of the 2007-8 Free Minds Project. A $25,000 grant from the KDK-Harman Foundation has also been instrumental to the support of the twenty inspired and inspiring adults currently enrolled in the Free Minds class, and has allowed the Project to provide healthier meals and enriched child care services in its second year. Most recently, the Sooch Foundation has awarded the Institute a three-year $24,000 grant to implement comprehensive measurement and evaluation as well as alumni tracking and support.

Filling what the Lumina Foundation for Education has described as the critical gap in the adult education landscape between non-credit remedial education and job-training programs and expensive college degree programs, the Free Minds Project is enabling another class of students to return to learning this year. The project continues to offer participants instruction from distinguished professors, books and materials, tickets to cultural events, academic and career advising services, and a writing consultant at no cost to students. Support services including child care, transportation assistance, and dinner before each class remove some of the barriers adults traditionally face to returning to school.

We are continuing to seek foundation support for the Free Minds Project, but making this program a permanent fixture on the Austin educational scene will likely require a targeted program endowment. Accordingly, the Humanities Institute is making the Free Minds Project a centerpiece of its development campaign, just underway, in which it will be seeking to raise $3 million by 2010 to sustain a range of innovative civic and institutional partnerships and public humanities programs that connect the University more closely with the surrounding community.

Abbie Navarrete, who represented her classmates as the student speaker at the first Free Minds graduation ceremony last May, suggests why it is important that the Institute meet this goal.

"I feel as though I have been taken out of the cave and our class discussions have helped me adjust to the light," she says, invoking Plato. "This intellectual awakening has changed how I view myself, my place in the community and in the world. It is especially exciting to be able to share this new view with my children. Most of my family has never completed high school, much less attended college, and although I have always told my children I expect them to finish school and go on to college, I could not offer them an example in their own family."

Abbie is now in a college degree program at Austin Community College; her philosophy professor reports she is the best student in his class!

Contact the Humanities Institute at information@humanitiesinstitute.utexas.edu or 512-471-9056 for more information about the Free Minds Project or the Institute’s development efforts.

"Every class I attended gave me encouragement to become a better citizen and apply the values of reflection to my life....I have been profoundly transformed in becoming a better reader, listener, mother, and co-worker." —Maryann Ramos, Free Minds Project graduate