Grants or Gifts Relating to Women in Higher Education

Here is this week’s news of grants and gifts that may be of particular interest to women in higher education.

The Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at the City College of New York received a $1,291,000 grant from the NoVo Foundation to fund the “Beyond Identity: A Gendered Platform for Scholar Activists” initiative. The program will train young women of color in identity-driven research, allowing them to use their experiences with discrimination to produce unique research agendas. The project will be under the direction of Nimmi Gowrinathan, a visiting scholar at City College and a senior scholar at the Center for Political Conflict, Gender, and People’s Rights at the University of California, Berkeley.

Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond received $50,600 in donations from a group of 16 donors to create the Women in Science Dentistry and Medicine (WISDM) Mother’s Room on the fourth floor of the James Branch Cabell Library. The lactation room is reserved for breastfeeding women and their babies.

The University of Pittsburgh received a $3.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for programs to improve the ability of low-income women and women of color to make informed decisions about permanent surgical procedures to prevent pregnancy. Female sterilization is the second most common form of birth control in the United States and is disproportionately used by low-income women and women of color.

Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, will use a grant from the Association of American Colleges and Universities to support two series of dinner discussion groups; one for Black students and the other for Muslim women students. The group for Muslim women will allow the women to “engage in topics such as the intersection of race, Islam, and gender fluidity,” according to the university. The programs will be under the direction of Janet Cooper Nelson, chaplain at Brown University.

The University of Washington received a two-year, $138,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study gender identity among children ages four to six.