The Lockwood Foundation Grant is an incredible occasion for the entirety of Bellevue College. Starting January 6, staff have the chance to apply for a portion of the total $10,000 that will be donated by the Lockwood Foundation and the Bellevue College Foundation. The money will be used to further staff-run projects devoted to improving the college and creating innovations in teaching.
Applications for the Lockwood Foundation Grant are open until February 24. Information meetings, where faculty are free to walk in to ask questions about the grant or have their application read by a Foundation staff member, will be held on January 29 and February 13. In order to apply, faculty will need to demonstrate how the project will help students, teachers and the campus. The official application is judged on how closely the project adheres to the grant’s purpose, the likeliness the project will succeed, how many people will be benefitted by the project, and a variety of other factors.
Because of the nature of the grant, everyone at Bellevue College is slated to benefit. The money from the grant will go to chosen staff, but the donations will ultimately be funneled back towards the wellbeing of the entire college: students, other staff and the campus. Similar grants in the past, have provided invaluable developments, furthering a multitude of aspects of campus life. Topics ranging from library research guides to DECA participation have all been expanded on account of the BC Foundation. In 2019, the Lockwood Foundation donated to two staff projects from widely different fields.
One of the winning projects, focused on developing the use of different types of virtual reality in teaching, was developed by Christina Sciabarra, a social science professor. The project begins with creating a Faculty Learning Community, a completely peer-led group of faculty who will work to advance teaching, learning, and the university. This FLC will then focus on “creating a curriculum that is based on the various forms of virtual reality including extended (XR) and augmented (AR) realities,” according to the official article on the BC Foundation website.
The other project, developed by Steven Martel, Yu-Ting Su, and Ana Bravo, all licensed counselors at Bellevue College, worked to grant access to psychological assessments for low-income students. Yu-Ting Su, one of the collaborators on the project, explained that the project was “part of the long-term effort for the Counseling Center to provide low-income students with suspected learning disabilities proper psychological assessments.”
“We saw students who suspect they have learning disabilities,” Su said, “but […] did not have the financial resources to be evaluated.” Without assessments and documents, they couldn’t get the support and accommodations from the Disability Resource Center that they needed. “We empathized with the challenges the students faced and wanted to help them.”
The project begins with training BC counselors to give psychological evaluations. From there, they can provide them for low-income students. However, the grant money was needed to jumpstart the program. “The money from the grant to the project was instrumental,” Su explained, “Without the money, we would not be able to begin to receive the training needed for us to move forward.”
At the end of the day, the Lockwood Foundation Grant is for everyone at Bellevue College. Through the generosity of both the Bellevue College Foundation and the Lockwood Foundation, BC staff have and will continue to improve life for the entirety of the campus.
