The Office of International Student Affairs welcomes gifts of any size! $150 might be used for winter break activities for students who can’t go home, or it might be used to help supplement a high-need student’s application for post-completion practical training. We have also used donor gifts to support creative projects like #GladYou’reMyNeighbor yard signs, the JRC Gallery of Flags, and our new “Middle of Everywhere” street sign on central campus. 

Karen Edwards
Associate Dean and Director
Office of International Student Affairs

Gifts designated for the Conard Environmental Research Area (CERA) are hugely helpful to CERA’s mission of education through ecological restoration and research. With a gift of $150, we can purchase a set of flame-resistant coveralls or a water-pump backpack, necessary gear when we apply fire to CERA’s prairies and woodlands. The same $150 can supply 1–2 pairs of binoculars for Grinnell students watching birds forage at experimental feeders, or it can supply rubber boots for the CERA’s summer restoration interns.

Vince Eckhart
Waldo S. Walker Professor of Biology

Gifts to the Department of Theatre and Dance enable us to give students experiences our normal operating budgeting is unable to support. Past donations have helped fund student opportunities such as professional conferences, campus workshops with alumni who are working in the arts, and collaboration with professionals who share their talents as composers, choreographers, directors, designers, actors, and other professions with our students. The use of donated money continues to allow us to enrich the experiences and educational opportunities of our students.

Erik Sanning ’89
Technical Director
Department of Theatre and Dance 

Grinnell’s Grant O. Gale Observatory supports the education of Grinnell students, student/faculty research, and outreach programs for the College and town communities. Each of these functions depends not only on the allocation of resources to individuals, but on the maintenance of the facility for the benefit of all. Donor support plays an important role in that maintenance. For example, small donor contributions are partially funding an upgrade of the old, vulnerable telescope control system.

Bob Cadmus
Professor Emeritus and Observatory Expert
Physics Department and Grant O. Gale Observatory

Small amounts of money go a long way in the Liberal Arts in Prison Program. $150 covers an incarcerated student’s books for one semester of coursework. It might also cover travel costs for a tutor to come weekly to assist a group of students. Or it can be used for a box of dictionaries that incarcerated students use for years.

Emily Guenther ’07
Director, Liberal Arts in Prison Program

We are trying to empower more students to work as sustainability coordinators and help implement the College’s sustainability plan. A gift of $150 funds more than 15 hours of student work. With an average weekly workload of three hours a week for each coordinator, $150 would fund more than five weeks of employment for a student sustainability coordinator!

Chris Bair ’96
Environmental and Safety Coordinator
Campus Sustainability

The Grinnell College Museum of Art is grateful for all contributions to our work. $150 allows us to purchase supplies for creative study breaks for students. These events are connected to the current museum exhibition and often are student-organized. Or we might use $150 to pay for the registration of a student assistant to attend a museum conference, improving their understanding of the work that is possible for their career. We might pool several gifts to purchase special equipment. For instance, we used gift funds to purchase the portable stools that are used for class visits in the museum. One-time or ongoing small donations give us the flexibility to meet opportunities as they arise throughout the year, expanding our ability to share art with everyone.

Lesley Wright
Director, Grinnell College Museum of Art 

Gifts to Grinnell provide the following for the Writing, Reading, and Speaking Center:

• Two months of the annual subscription fee for the scheduling software that allows students to make their own appointments as far in advance as they want. The software also allows center instructors to track students’ progress over time.
• Two weeks of pay for a peer writing mentor who works with all first-year Grinnellians in a tutorial to help them adjust to the expectations of college-level writing and meet their own high standards.
• Six copies of a scholarly book — enough for all of the Center's professional instructors to learn about research that matters in our work. In recent semesters, we have discussed how to teach critical reading in our writing classrooms, strengthen our work with multilingual students, and develop anti-racist pedagogies.

Tisha Turk
Director of the Writing, Reading, and Speaking Center

Gifts of $150 can help the Physics Department in a variety of ways, such as purchasing:

• Five PHY 132 General Physics II electricity and magnetism experiment kits that students can use from home or their residence hall.
• Five microcontroller boards for PHY 220 Electronics labs and student projects.
• Pizza for a weekly physics seminar.
• Snacks for study breaks in the Physics Commons for a semester.
• Almost half of an annual group membership for Chapter 2557 of the Society of Physics Students.
• A full dewar of liquid nitrogen for low-temperature experiments involving superconductivity and X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy in the modern physics lab.

Paul Tjossem
Professor and Chair
Department of Physics 

A $150 gift recently contributed to two students conducting independent research projects. The students traveled to Blank Park Zoo and Des Moines Ape Initiative to do observational behavioral research on bonobo chimpanzees. Both the travel and access to these great apes had costs, which we were able to cover thanks to generous donors. We were also able to fund a student to undertake background research this summer, which will lead to a mentor advanced research project next year. The research involves doing interviews with health care professionals in Minnesota to better understand the public health crisis of intimate partner violence.

Monty Roper
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Anthropology

A donation of $150 to the biology department allows us to continue to bring cutting-edge technologies and reagents into our classrooms. Our class budgets are often stressed, and the extra funding improves the research experiences for our students. With a large department, it can be easy for students to feel lost, so this funding can also be useful for community-building activities that bring together students and faculty outside of the classroom. Finally, this funding can be used to help support our seminar series and allow us to bring leading experts to campus.

Shannon Hinsa-Leasure
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Biology 

The psychology department uses gift funds for a variety of student-centered purposes. For example, we have funded three to four students’ attendance at the Midwestern Psychological Association’s annual conference. These students do not present research; instead, they are there to listen to talks, attend workshops, and network with faculty and students from other colleges and universities. These experiences have tremendous impact on these students’ understanding of the field, their enthusiasm for continued study, and their future success in gaining employment or admission to graduate school.

Chris Ralston
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Psychology