Our diverse and rapidly changing world requires Loyola graduates who have an understanding of the need for thoughtful, intentional action that brings about peace and justice. Loyola can apply our 500-year-old Jesuit tradition and core values to the challenges and opportunities that today’s world presents.
Your support will help position Loyola to graduate students who are already engaged in these issues in ways that will have a transformational impact. As students and faculty engage in and learn from these issues even more, Loyola will graduate even more of the leaders that our world needs today and tomorrow.
Loyola Angels Fund
Underrepresented entrepreneurs have long lacked access to capital to grow their businesses. Loyola and its supporters want to challenge these inequities and be a force for transformation in Baltimore and beyond. Through the Loyola Angels fund, we can be a part of improving the future of venture capital by exposing and educating students about the industry and offering them real-life investing experiences.
Loyola Angels is a yearlong interdisciplinary undergraduate learning opportunity that will serve as a vehicle for Loyola University Maryland's Simon Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship (CI&E) and our investors to support job and wealth creation in Baltimore. It provides student innovators with angel investment experience while serving as a funding vehicle for local underserved entrepreneurs, especially Baltimore-based minority and female-owned businesses.
Through the Loyola Angels fund, students will participate in two-sequential classes over the course of a year that are taught by CI&E faculty and local experts in angel investing. The fall course will include a history of the institutional inequities in access to capital and wealth creation experienced by entrepreneurs of color. Students will learn how to conduct due diligence on early-stage ventures, the role of effectuation in successful startups, and how the angel investment process can create an impact on the financial and social bottom lines of the company and its surrounding community.
The spring semester provides a select group of diverse students the opportunity to practically apply the principles of angel investing through their participation in local angel investment funding groups. Under the guidance of an experienced angel investor mentor, students research, interview, and make recommendations to invest in companies alongside managers of the Loyola Angels fund.
With the support of donors, Loyola will establish Loyola Angels with a $250,000 charitable fund to support the courses and finance investments in Maryland businesses, with a preference for those led by women and entrepreneurs of color. The course will launch in the academic year 2022-23, with the first investments recommended by student angel investors in spring 2023. Enrollment in the class will be application based, allowing faculty to select the most motivated and prepared student cohort.
The Simon Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship
The mission of the Simon Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship (CI&E) is to elevate innovation and entrepreneurship at Loyola. Our vision extends beyond the University campus into Baltimore, where the CI&E is a part of transforming Baltimore through our support for wealth creation and job creation driven by underrepresented entrepreneurs and innovators.
The goals of the Simon Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship are to recruit and nurture more student innovators, engage them in hands-on experiences, and grow their innovation and entrepreneurship knowledge, to help them succeed in careers, and in life. Through the CI&E, Loyola will expand our civic leadership into the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems and fuel our innate culture of creative experimentation and trial.
Founded in 2020, the Karson Institute aims to provide a space for researchers, students, social justice workers, and activists to come together to research, discuss, debate, and explore answers to America’s most urgent questions on inequality, injustice, and racial inequity. Karsonya “Kaye” Whitehead, Ph.D., professor of communication, African, and African American Studies, is the founding executive director of The Karson Institute.
Using Baltimore as a lens and healing justice as a framework, The Institute researches issues, collects and houses resources, and trains students and faculty on how to actively address racial trauma and violence; anti-racism and anti-blackness; and systemic oppression.
The Karson Institute is comprised of three Centers—the Center for Public Engagement, the Center for Teaching and Learning, and the Center for Research and Culture—and they are all fully functioning. In August 2021, the director’s position was elevated and refined to broaden the impact of the Karson Institute’s work throughout the University.
In its first year, Whitehead led the Institute in conversations with thought leaders around the country, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, Ibram Kendi, Ph.D., Lisa Snowden-McCray, Alice McDermott, Dr. Lawrence Brown, U.S. Rep. Kweisi Mfume, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, and Leonard Pitts, among others.
Learn more on the Karson Institute for Race, Peace & Social Justice website.
Ignatius Scholars Program
The Ignatius Scholars Program (ISP) provides opportunities to students who identify as first-generation college students, demonstrate significant financial need, or come from diverse backgrounds. The program is designed for first-year students who exhibit strong academic promise, leadership abilities, and high professional aspirations.
ISP, which is co-sponsored by ALANA Services and Undergraduate Studies, is comprised of a summer component (inclusive of academic enhancement workshops, connections to campus resources, community service, and acclimation to Loyola and Baltimore through social and cultural excursions and activities), participation in one of four pre-fall programs, and a fall component (inclusive of weekly academic advising, study hours, and group workshops). Each year, 30 scholars participate in this highly selective program to get a head start on their college career.
Loyola recognizes the impact an expanded ISP can have on our students, inviting Charm City Promise recipients to apply, transforming it to a four-year program that strengthens student writing and math skills and smooths their transition to Loyola, bring students to campus earlier, offer them service opportunities in the community, offer peer mentoring through ALANA services, and provide them with proactive advising with a student success coach. The program would also provide vocational/career discernment, provide stipends for internships or study abroad experiences, and provide guidance for career exploration or graduate school applications, along with networking and meetings with donors, alumni, and the president.
Faculty and Curriculum Development Initiative
Through this initiative, Loyola can invest in areas that are critical to the Jesuit, liberal arts education that prepares our students to be ready for anything and everything. Support in this area can create (or strengthen?) the Equity and Inclusion Faculty Fellows program and accelerate department-led initiatives to enhance the diversity and justice education Loyola offers.
Inclusive Teaching Faculty Development Initiative: An outstanding Jesuit university needs to provide inclusive, thriving, diverse classrooms that support disciplinary and inter-disciplinary conversations about power, privilege, difference, and justice. Funding can support summer and academic year professional development for faculty to deepen inclusive teaching practices, such as a multi-day workshop and follow-up accountability through faculty peer observations and discussions. Outside pedagogical experts could come to the University to facilitate workshops on classroom management, course policy, and content decisions that have evidence-based positive impacts in fostering inclusive classrooms. Funding could also support faculty participation in peer discussions during the academic year.
Diversity-Justice Requirement Change: The University’s goal is to increase the diversity course requirement from one to three courses over a five-year period with an intentional progression from introductory, to within-discipline practice, to mastery. Gifts will provide stipends for faculty to have course release time for they can revise a current offering so that it meets the standards of a diversity-justice course.