In the liberal arts, small student populations, intimate learning environments, and dedicated faculty and staff create pathways for students to develop a sense of purpose, belonging, and identity on campus — pillars of wellbeing that will sustain them long after commencement day. Amid a youth mental health crisis with young adults reporting that their lives lack purpose, the liberal arts mission of whole-person development has never been more vital. For twelve small colleges across the United States, that mission has become a collective venture thanks to a $3.275 million grant from the Endeavor Foundation. “Collective challenges require collective solutions,” says Warren Wilson College President Damián Fernández. “The Endeavor Foundation’s collaborative approach to addressing student mental health and wellness—one of the pervasive issues of our times—promises broader and deeper impact.” 

The Endeavor Lab Colleges (ELCs) are a consortium of 12 small liberal arts colleges across the United States who share a commitment to student mental health, experiential learning, civic engagement, and purposeful work. Working across their campuses as a cohesive ecosystem, the collaborative has been supported by the Endeavor Foundation in New York City since 2016. In 2023, the ELCs — Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH; Bennington College in Bennington, VT; Blackburn College in Carlinville, IL; College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, ME; Northland College in Ashland, WI; Prescott College in Prescott, AZ; Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA; St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD; St. John’s College in Santa Fe, NM; Sterling College in Craftsbury, VT; Unity Environmental University in New Gloucester, ME; and Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC — received the $3.275 million grant to fund the first phase of their collaborative project, “Enhancing Student Learning and Experience through Campus Wellness, Student Well-Being, and Mental Health Initiatives.”

Capacity to care

Phase I of the Endeavor Mental Health Initiative, which will continue to unfold over the course of the 2024-2025 academic year, focuses on building capacity — on the individual ELC campuses and across the “collaborative school” — for shared pilot projects within four categories: curricular initiatives to promote mental health and wellbeing in the classroom; purposeful life and work; place-based experiential learning; and expanded services, which include clinical and non-clinical mental health interventions such as peer mentoring, faculty and staff trainings, and bringing 24/7 counseling services to campus.

The colleges each received $100,000 for capacity-building in the 2023-2024 academic year and will receive an additional $75,000 to continue their efforts in the upcoming academic year. Also during Phase I, the Endeavor Lab Colleges will convene on progress and implementation, share expertise, and deepen their inter-institutional collaboration. With successful completion of this phase, the colleges will earn access to an additional $5.225 million over three years. Together, they will design and implement mental health and wellbeing that can be shared and adapted across the collective and become self-sustaining.

Dr. Lori Collins-Hall is the project manager for the Endeavor Foundation Mental Health Initiative. She also serves as vice president and chief operating officer of Sterling College, a liberal arts college in rural Craftsbury, Vermont and member of the Endeavor Lab Colleges. Prior to her work with the Endeavor initiative, Collins-Hall spent 20 years as a professor of sociology at Hartwick College in upstate New York, where her teaching and scholarship focused on criminal justice reform, alternatives to incarceration, and victim advocacy. She then served for five years as the provost and vice president of academic affairs at Antioch College in Ohio (also a member of the Endeavor Lab), before coming to Sterling in 2021. 

“Collective challenges require collective solutions. The Endeavor Foundation’s collaborative approach to addressing student mental health and wellness—one of the pervasive issues of our times—promises broader and deeper impact.”

From the first leg of her career at Hartwick College to her work with the Endeavor Foundation nearly 30 years later, Collins-Hall has been dedicated to community-based service work, exploring the transformative potential of the liberal arts model and place-based learning at institutions that value experiential education.  Both Antioch and Sterling (as well as Blackburn College and Warren Wilson College, also Endeavor Lab institutions), are among the ten federally-recognized work colleges that compose the Work College Consortium. These small colleges share a commitment to place-based education, community engagement and service, integrating work into the learning experience. 

Collins-Hall describes the Mental Health Project as a “capstone” to a career dedicated to cultivating pathways for student success in the liberal arts. For her, mental health care and the liberal arts share a common goal of whole-person development: “Within the liberal arts framework,” Collins-Hall says, “health and wellness becomes another avenue for being a whole person.” Whole-person development encompasses critical thinking, social engagement, and a sense of community —ideas we often associate with higher education and, more broadly, with the experience of “becoming” oneself — but it also includes self-care, self-reflection, and understanding one’s own behaviors within a larger social context. At their core, Collins-Hall explains, the Endeavor Lab Colleges have joined as a united front to develop methods “to integrate mental health and wellness as an acceptable and central piece of the liberal arts’ mission toward becoming a holistic person.”

The big impact of a small college

While the Endeavor Lab Colleges vary somewhat in size — most have fewer than 1,000 students; Sterling College has fewer than 100 — they all fit within the “small liberal arts college” or “micro college” designations. Institutions of their size and scope provide intimate learning environments, community engagement, and social belonging. For students, this kind of college environment can be an opportunity to establish a strong sense of self and place. As Collins-Hall describes, “These small colleges are community-oriented. They are student-focused,” and, importantly, she says, “they tend to be very relational, so people feel the impact when their communities are healthy — and they feel the impact when they’re not, perhaps more immensely, more directly.”

Among the most significant offerings of a small college environment is the development of students’ sense of purpose. Though purposeful work and learning have been shown to promote wellbeing and life satisfaction throughout a person’s lifetime, a 2022 Harvard University study of teens and young adults found that a striking 58 percent of respondents reported feeling little to no purpose or meaning. By prioritizing purpose, one of the four project areas of the Endeavor Lab Colleges, a liberal arts education can set students up for wellbeing in their post-graduate lives.

But these small institutions are not without challenges. As undergraduate enrollment falls, Americans’ trust in higher education continues to falter, and colleges now close at a rate of one per week, higher education has reached an inflection point — and perhaps no institution feels the weight of change as acutely as the small liberal arts college. While the endowments of larger universities may insulate them somewhat from cultural and financial pressures, those same pressures can be lethal for small colleges. Wells College in Aurora, NY was originally the thirteenth member of the Endeavor Lab Colleges; in April, it abruptly announced its closure after 156 years. (The shutdown and its fallout were the subject of a deep-dive by The Hechinger Report.)

Through a consortial approach, the Endeavor Mental Health Initiative preserves the immense value that the small liberal arts colleges provide their students while mitigating the budgetary challenges to creating and sustaining new programs. These are, as Collins-Hall describes, “some of the smallest, leanest, least financially resourced institutions.” 

Joining forces on mental health and wellbeing amplifies what each institution is able to accomplish on its own. “The support of the Endeavor Foundation and participation in the collaborative is vital to our small, private school as we strive to provide the best possible educational experiences to our students,” says Randolph College President Sue Ott Rowlands. “Our Endeavor Foundation grant funding has made it possible for us to enhance services to our students.”

While the endowments of larger universities may insulate them somewhat from cultural and financial pressures, those same pressures can be lethal for small liberal arts colleges.

Dr. Matt Vosler is a professor of outdoor leadership at Warren Wilson College. Vosler grew up in rural Western Ohio, where the outdoors were an integral part of his life — so integral, in fact, that he did not realize their impact until college, when his priorities shifted and experiences in nature became scarce. During his undergraduate studies at Ohio University, Vosler found himself spending less time outside— and feeling less fulfilled — than ever before. 

“Growing up in a rural area, being outdoors had always been a part of my daily routine. Then, suddenly, it wasn’t, and I was suffering.” At this realization, Vosler abandoned the pre-medical track he was on and went on to earn a degree in recreation, or, as he affectionately put it, “the study of play.” While pursuing a master’s degree in experiential education at Minnesota State University Mankato, he studied the traditional K-12 schooling system and the history of education reform in the U.S., leading to a revelation about the structure of education and the kinds of learners it is designed to serve. “When I left my K-12 education, I thought I wasn’t a good learner,” Vosler reflects. He experienced hyperactivity and ADHD as a child, and the traditional educational model was at odds with his style of learning. Upon discovering experiential education as an adult, Vosler thought of the many learners, including himself, who could benefit from the hands-on approach. He earned his PhD in curriculum and instruction, specializing in the transformative potential of outdoor education. 

Today, Vosler points out, students entering college had their middle school and high school years interrupted by the pandemic, spending formative developmental years online. Connection with nature supports attention restoration and stress reduction, but for a generation of college students that is less social and spends less time outdoors than its predecessors, the power of nature as a space for holistic wellbeing has eluded many. In his role at Warren Wilson, Vosler is devoted to exploring the connection between mental health and experiential learning in non-traditional classroom spaces. Nature Rx is a program that joins traditional mental health supports, such as counseling and clinical services, with the use of nature as a powerful supplementary tool for wellbeing. The mission, Vosler says, is to “empower students to cultivate relationships to nature, to others, and to themselves, creating sanctuary within the chaos of the modern college experience.” In a time when “hustle culture,” careerism, and pursuit of high-paying jobs are a proven detriment to college students’ sense of purpose, that sanctuary is worth protecting.

“At a small college, our capacity gets stretched. With the Endeavor grant, we were able to hit the ground running,” Vosler says. “We can grow and sustain our outdoor programs, ensuring that mental health and wellbeing remain an institutional priority.”

At Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA, Dean of Students Chris Lemasters is spearheading the Endeavor Lab’s expanded services initiative. With a background in residential life, Lemasters embodies the community-oriented approach to wellbeing that the liberal arts model encourages. “In the 2024-2025 academic year and beyond,” Lemasters says, “we have an opportunity to bring new and comprehensive mental health resources to expand the scope of our services and consistently keep mental health on the radar.” This expansion will go beyond acute care, such as mental health first aid, by prioritizing wellbeing across all areas of student life.

With an undergraduate population of just under 500 students, Randolph’s faculty promotes experiential and student-centered learning opportunities. Last year, Professor of Religious Studies Suzanne Bessenger and her colleagues built a contemplative studies minor into the Randolph curriculum, after a course taught by Bessenger proved meaningful for students. The contemplative studies field illuminates the human psychological experience through philosophical inquiry, deepening students’ exploration of self while encouraging intercultural exchange of ideas.

At Bennington College, Italian studies professor and First-Year Forum Director Dr. Barbara Alfano is exploring curricular opportunities such as trauma-informed learning to integrate wellbeing into the classroom within the first year of college. The First-Year Forum is a year-long advising course designed to help first-year students navigate campus resources, engage with their community, explore their interests, and develop their writing and critical thinking skills. As director of the First-Year Forum, Alfano thinks a lot about how the first year shapes the college experience. Her work within the Endeavor Lab focuses on integrating wellbeing into the liberal arts curriculum through developing shared curricular and co-curricular learning modules. 

Meanwhile in the Midwest, Blackburn College in Carlinville, IL conducted a Mental Health Needs Assessment to identify the status of student wellbeing on campus and helped college leaders locate areas for improvement. Now, the survey will expand from Blackburn into a multi-institution survey that will help all twelve Endeavor Lab institutions collect data on life experience, mental health, sense of belonging, and self-care behaviors among their students, creating a collective database for tracking and supporting mental health and wellness across the ELCs. 

In Bar Harbor, ME, College of the Atlantic Community Engagement Coordinator Nick Jenei is constructing campus maps to foster a sense of place and deepen students’ connections to their campus, local communities, and the cultural and natural history in their midst. Using interactive digital maps, the initiative leverages mobile phone technology to promote real-world engagement and will be adapted to create a sense of place and connection on other Endeavor campuses. Being connected to one’s physical place — its people, history, and environment — has shown positive effects on human health, improving both emotional wellbeing and academic performance in college. 

Together, the Endeavor Lab Colleges are not only enacting change on their own campuses, but tapping into the growing pool of knowledge they have built together. Their models for mental health and wellness are scaled and adapted to reach across the collaborative school of the Endeavor campuses. “These initiatives will support thousands of students on the members' campuses but reach far beyond,” President Fernández says. “The work will have a multiplier effect through the creation of a model for all colleges and universities to implement refined best practices for student mental health and wellness."