How We Grant

The Teagle Foundation’s commitment to support liberal education—which we see as fundamental to meaningful work, effective citizenship, and a fulfilling life—infuses all of our grantmaking. Our grant initiatives focus on faculty leaders who invigorate undergraduate education, and through them, on the students they serve. We expect the efforts we support to be aligned with institutional priorities, and that grantee institutions will seek to sustain successful initiatives beyond the life of the grant. We are prepared to help disseminate ideas and practices supported by our grants so that they are useful to faculty and institutions beyond those initially funded.

Current Initiatives

Our grant initiatives aim to revitalize liberal education and to make it widely accessible. We want the lifelong benefits of a liberal arts education to be available to all students.

We provide seed funding to extraordinary educators with concrete solutions to urgent challenges. We grant nationally to a diverse array of institutions—community colleges, liberal arts colleges, regional comprehensive institutions, and research universities—as well as other higher education organizations.

View our current initiatives >

Our Strategy

We believe that innovations tested at some institutions can often be adopted or adapted at institutions beyond the original grantees. Therefore when solutions to common problems are tried, tested, and redefined, we lift them up as models for others, and we work with grantees and prospective grantees to design ways to “scale them up.”

We establish new grant initiatives through an extended discussion process. In the earliest stages of thinking about a program possibility, we review the literature, consult informally with colleagues working in the area, and talk with our Board of Directors. We also regularly convene leaders of funded projects participating in a given initiative so they can learn and benefit from each other’s work.

Please note that we do not accept unsolicited proposals, but welcome concept papers as the basis for inviting full planning or implementation proposals. Read more about our grant guidelines.