The Character Catalyst Grant, provided by the generous support of the Kern Family Foundation, offers USA-based graduates of the Jubilee Centre’s MA Character Education programme an opportunity to advance their existing work in character education.
Below are the successful applicants of Character Catalyst Grant and the projects that are currently underway.
If you wish to view the projects that have been completed under the grant, please click here.
Nancy Van Erp
Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science
Developing Curious Mindsets to Promote Innovation & Flourishing
The aim of this project is to develop curious mindsets and advance curiosity as a central intellectual virtue within Mayo Clinic and beyond by drawing on Mayo Clinic’s organizational values and goals as identified in its strategic plan. This project will design, create, and launch two Take 5 videos and supplemental materials about the role of curiosity (as well as tangential intellectual, moral, civic, and performance virtues) that empower innovation and promote human flourishing. Take 5 videos are an established education tool used at Mayo Clinic for quick, engaging, practical, and inspiring training experiences that are grounded in scholarly research and are often supplemented by additional handouts or resource guides that promote further investigation and application. The project aims to inspire health profession educators at Mayo Clinic to see curiosity not simply as a personal or organizational trait, but as a chosen way of being.
Zekeriya Yuksel
School Of Science and Technology
TORCH Curriculum: Igniting Character Virtues Through Storytelling
This project pilots an innovative character education curriculum at SST Corpus Christi College Preparatory High School (grades 8–12), built on the school’s ethical framework T.O.R.C.H. — Trustworthiness, Open-Mindedness, Responsibility, Compassion, and Honesty.
The TORCH Curriculum explores how storytelling can support structured character formation by integrating narrative analysis, guided reflection, and autonomy-based practice. Carefully selected, age-appropriate film segments — including examples from Disney storytelling — serve as narrative contexts through which students analyze and identify key components of virtue as outlined in the Jubilee Centre framework.
Lessons follow the Jubilee Centre’s Taught–Caught–Sought framework and focus on helping students recognize, interpret, and practice virtues through structured reflection and real-life application. The curriculum is implemented during College, Career, and Military Readiness (CCMR) advisory periods, which prepare students for academic, professional, and civic life beyond high school. The lesson plans also incorporate Mentimeter, Kahoot, and AI-supported activities to increase adolescents’ engagement and intrinsic motivation.
The project aims to examine how narrative-based instruction combined with autonomy-supportive learning can deepen students’ moral imagination and strengthen the development of virtue identity and practice.
Project outputs include:
- A sample TORCH lesson plan set
- A teacher implementation toolkit
- An evaluation summary report documenting pilot findings
Julia Schmitt
Medical College of Wisconsin
Evaluation of the MCW Practical Wisdom Pathway: A Deliberation and Reflection Model to Promote Practical Wisdom Development
The MCW Practical Wisdom Pathway is a five-step reflection and deliberation model that helps faculty facilitators guide medical students through complex, ethically-charged case discussions in the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Learning Communities. Its steps — Listen with Care, Set a Caring Aim, Gather Perspectives, Make a Plan, and Reflect with Character in Mind — help students draw on character strengths to navigate moral complexity in clinical training. Developed through two years of human-centered design work, the Pathway was adopted into MCW’s mandatory first-year curriculum in 2025.
This Catalyst Grant project, funded by the University of Birmingham’s Jubilee Centre for Character & Virtues, builds on that work by assessing the Pathway’s impact and exploring its potential for wider use. Using an online survey and semi-structured interviews with MCW Learning Community faculty facilitators, the research aims to:
- Evaluate faculty perceptions of the Pathway’s efficacy in fostering virtue literacy and practical wisdom.
- Identify facilitation tactics and best practices faculty use with the model.
- Identify barriers and facilitators to implementation, and explore the Pathway’s transferability to other educational settings — including undergraduate, graduate, and K-12 contexts beyond its original home in medical education.
Findings will be synthesized into a practical roadmap of key insights, success factors, and data-driven recommendations to guide other institutions and educators interested in adopting or adapting the model, alongside peer-reviewed presentations and publications.
Cristy Guleserian
Wake Forest University
From Seed to Scale: Lessons, Strategies, and Insights for Transformative Character Education in Complex Higher Ed Systems
This project seeks to capture the arc of launching and sustaining successful character initiatives in higher ed contexts, offering multiple pathways and reflective resources for institutions embarking on this work. Informed by experiences at multiple institutions, this project will document key decisions, challenges, and strategies that shape the evolution of a character initiative from conception to scale.
The anticipated deliverable is a practical “guide” that walks individuals and organizations through the complexities of integrating character education into their own higher education contexts. Drawing from interviews, artifacts, and reflections, the project will provide insights into leadership, community engagement, practices, and structural considerations necessary for success. It will highlight the importance of aligning people, purpose, language, and culture to ensure initiatives are meaningful and sustainable.
The guide will include:
- Insights from multiple institutions and key contributors highlighting various pathways to initiation, development, and operationalization.
- Sample timelines and milestones, from conception to scale.
- Practical strategies, resources, and reflective tools for engaging multiple and diverse perspectives, fostering relationships, identifying champions, building capacity, and collaboratively making decisions
- Reflections on key challenges, barriers, and strategies for navigating and overcoming resistance.
- Guidance on moving from pilot initiatives to institutional integration
- Stories and examples of what worked, and what did not, in various contexts.
Cristy Guleserian serves as the Executive Director in the College for the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University. In this role she leads institutional efforts to integrate character and leadership concepts and practices across undergraduate student, faculty, and staff initiatives. Prior to her move to Wake Forest, Cristy served as architect and Executive Director of Principled Innovation at Arizona State University. Centered at ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation, she co-led institutional grant initiatives to embed character into curricular, co-curricular, and cultural efforts across one of the country’s largest public universities. Prior to her career in higher education, she spent several years contributing to the K12 community as Director of Social Emotional Learning and Character Development Programs with the Casa Center for Positive Social Change, where she worked with schools and districts to transform culture through fostering whole school community character initiatives. Cristy holds a B.S. in Interpersonal Communication from Ohio University, an M.S. in Management from New England College, and an M.A. in Character Education from the University of Birmingham. She thrives in community and collaborative spaces and engages a deeply relational and integrated approach to fostering character and organizational transformation.
Timothy McGovern
Wake Forest University
Narrative-focused mentoring to cultivate moral reasoning and behavior in primary schools
The aim of the project is to analyse how a school-based mentoring intervention affects students’ self-narratives and their ethical actions. Specifically, the project seeks to examine how the intervention impacts students’ self-narratives (particularly their motivation for moral action), analyse how the intervention impacts the self-reported moral behaviour of the participants, and produce resources to implement effective interventions relating to self-narrative development through mentoring. The project aims to produce an evaluation report summarizing the intervention and analysing changes in students’ responses, a descriptive account of mentoring practices within the project, and practical recommendations for integrating narrative-focused reflection into mentoring programming.
Interested in applying?
You can find more information here including eligibility and application deadlines, or you can contact h.odonoghue@bham.ac.uk