Hamline University is one of 10 colleges awarded a multi-year Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) grant from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) to create a center for racial healing.
Announced on August 16, the centers will help “educate, prepare and inspire the next generation of leaders to advance justice and build inclusive communities,” according to AAC&U leaders.
Institutions were selected based on a competitive application process and were chosen from more than 125 schools that applied. Supported by gifts of $520,000 and $399,763 from Newman’s Own Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF), respectively, the AAC&U will give selected schools such as Hamline an initial award of $30,000 to start a TRHT center at their campus.
The creation of the TRHT centers come in the wake of violent protests in Charlottesville, Va., after White supremacists and other hate groups marched through the University of Virginia campus and later clashed with counter-protestors downtown. The larger TRHT enterprise, however, was launched by WKKF in 2016 to address the historic and contemporary effects of racism today.
“In the aftermath of the horrific, heartbreaking events in Charlottesville, we must not be silent,” AAC&U President Lynn Pasquerella said in early August. “Instead, we must harness our collective intellectual, social and financial resources to transform words into action.”
Dr. Fayneese Miller, president of Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, says that the creation of the TRHT center at her institution is a personal one for her. Having grown up roughly 100 miles south of Charlottesville, she is quite aware of the deep racial issues in the U.S., she told MPR News.
Hamline’s center will offer racial healing and “another way of engaging people” about things happening underneath the surface. “If we don’t have those conversations, if we don’t come to some sort of understanding, I fear that we could return to some pretty dark days,” Miller added.
