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.

Spelman College, the liberal arts educational institution for women 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.

Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore received a $5 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to study the genetic factors that increase the risk of breast cancer. The Johns Hopkins Center for Cancer Target and Development will examine the process of metastasis.

The Center for Women in Business at Texas Woman’s University has announced a new grant program to help women entrepreneurs. Up to 10 women-owned small businesses will be selected to receive $5,000 grants for machinery, equipment, technology, marketing or other business-related endeavors. The Center for Women in Business is under the direction of Shannon Mantaro.

The Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame has announced the establishment of the Mother Theodore Guerin Research Travel Grant Program. The grant program is open to scholars of any discipline to defray travel and lodging expenses for visits to research repositories or to conduct oral interviews with women religious figures. The program is named for Saint Mother Theodore Guerin, a French missionary to Indiana who established the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, just north of Terre Haute, in 1840.

Ferrum College in Virginia received a donation from alumna Irma Smart that will provide the necessary start-up funds to support the new women’s golf program at the college. The college has had a men’s golf team for nearly a half century. Smart, an avid golfer, has been a member of the college’s board of trustees since 2015.