Philanthropic Support for Integrity
Integrity is moral wholeness—living consistently in moral wholeness. Its opposite is corruption, the distortion, perversion, and deterioration of moral goodness, resulting in the exploitation of people. Global integrity is moral wholeness at all levels in our world—from the individual to the institutional to the international. Global integrity is requisite for “building the future we want—being the people we need.” It is not easy, it is not always black and white, and it can be risky. These entries explore the many facets of integrity with a view towards the global efforts to promote sustainable development and wellbeing.
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Core Funding Areas
John Templeton Foundation
In this entry we feature the Templeton Foundation. If you look
into the types of research and initiatives that the Foundation is funding, you
will find a grouping (among many) that relates directly to integrity. See examples
in the list of projects below--preceded by information on the Foundation’s
mission, core funding areas, and a short video on character virtue development.
The Templeton Foundation seeks to do philanthropic work with integrity
and among other areas, to support the study and development of integrity through its philanthropy.
Mission
“The John Templeton Foundation serves as a philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality. We support research on subjects ranging from complexity, evolution, and infinity to creativity, forgiveness, love, and free will. We encourage civil, informed dialogue among scientists, philosophers, and theologians and between such experts and the public at large, for the purposes of definitional clarity and new insights.”
“The John Templeton Foundation serves as a philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality. We support research on subjects ranging from complexity, evolution, and infinity to creativity, forgiveness, love, and free will. We encourage civil, informed dialogue among scientists, philosophers, and theologians and between such experts and the public at large, for the purposes of definitional clarity and new insights.”
Core Funding Areas
“In the charter establishing his Foundation, the late Sir John
Templeton set out his philanthropic intentions under several broad headings.
These Core Funding Areas continue to guide our grant making as we work to find
world-class researchers and project leaders to share in our pursuit of Sir
John’s dynamic, contrarian, forward-looking vision. A number of topics—including creativity, freedom, gratitude, love, and
purpose—can be found under more than one Core Funding Area. The
Foundation welcomes proposals that bring
together these overlapping elements, especially by combining the tools and
approaches of different disciplines.”
Science and the Big Questions is the largest of
our Core Funding Areas. We support a broad
range of programs focused on the universal truths of character development and
on the roots of good character in human nature, whether understood from a
scientific, philosophical, or religious point of view….”
Video on Funding Character Virtue Development
(3.5 minutes)
Seven Funding Examples Related to Integrity (via
the site’s search engine):
The
Emory Integrity Project: Integrating and Assessing an Integrity Initiative in
University Education and Student Life “The Emory
Integrity Project (EIP) is an ambitious plan to transform university culture by
establishing integrity as a constant narrative theme in the undergraduate
experience. Integrity is a complex idea, but for our purposes reflects 1) a
capacity for critical reflection and analysis of the values and ethical
considerations in a given moral situation; 2) a practical skill set to
determine and implement moral courses of action; and 3) the fortitude to
withstand moral scrutiny and pressures to conform. Teaching integrity is a
pedagogical challenge in the university setting. The EIP will draw from the
literature and expertise on integrity formation in college-aged students, and
employ Emory’s history of integrity-based programs, to design and implement
campus-wide initiatives and programs to reimagine and refocus Emory’s
undergraduate experience. Using curricular and co-curricular strategies, the
EIP employs three primary virtues (and many associated virtues) to examine
integrity: 1) humility (an affectational posture towards oneself and others
characterized by other-regard and a recognition of one’s own imperfections and
limitations of knowledge and affect); 2) honor (an affectively and cognitively
based capacity to select and apply moral values to moral actions); and 3)
helpfulness (an interest in and willingness to assist others in fostering their
goals, interests, and aims).”
A
Planning Grant for the Achieving with Integrity Project: Early Stage Stage Development
of Core Components “The proposed one-year planning
grant is to support the early stage development of the Achieving with Integrity
(AwI) project, which aims to apply the principles of “reconstructive” character
education (Menezes & Campos, 2000) to promote students’ moral awareness,
judgment, commitment and action related to academic integrity…”
Leading
from Your Spark: A Life of Virtue and Integrity “This project
will support the gathering of approximately 30 young people (ages 15-17,
equivalent grades of 9-11) from different parts of the world (including
potentially, England, China, Russia and the Bahamas) and the United States at
Sewanee: The University of the South for a youth leadership summit from June
20, 2012 to June 24, 2012 in association with the Foundation’s anniversary
events in Tennessee. The goals of the youth summit are to stimulate and equip
participants to identify and tap their own “spark” to make a difference
regarding an issue or concern about which they are passionate, introduce
participants to 21st Century collaborative leadership strategies and skills,
engage participants in a practical project that stimulates growth and learning
while also preparing them for leadership in their own schools and communities,
and create a supportive learning community among diverse participants that can
be sustained beyond the event via social media.”
Increasing
Scientific Openness and Integrity “An academic scientist’s professional
success depends on publishing. Publishing norms emphasize novel, positive, tidy
results. As such, disciplinary incentives encourage design, analysis, and
reporting decisions that maximize publishability even at the expense of
accuracy. This challenges scientists' character because professional success is
enhanced by pursuing suboptimal scientific practices. As such, disciplinary
norms guide researchers toward practices that are contrary to personal and
scientific values. The end result is inflation of error in published science,
and interference with knowledge accumulation. Scientific integrity can be
improved with strategies that make the fundamental but abstract accuracy
motive—getting it right—competitive with the more tangible and concrete
incentive—getting it published.”
Exploring
the Role of Virtues in Determining Organizational Culture: A Planning Proposal
“Organizational culture has been well researched. But the
ethical culture of organizations—what we call the “culture of
integrity”—remains relatively unexamined. This project is important because the
time is right, the Institute’s cumulative work to date will inform our
findings, and we strongly believe that integrity underpins organizational
culture. This revised application is for a one-year planning grant to begin to
determine the role of virtues within organizations. Specifically, are there
core virtues critical to the ethical operation of an organization? Can these be
identified, studied, and re-combined to create a model for a culture of
integrity? To answer these questions, we propose to update our review of the
literature, identify best-practice examples of ethical organizations, profile
select organizations, and synthesize our findings. Based on this work, we hope
to develop a hypothesis on the role of virtues in determining organizational
culture and a proposal for researching that hypothesis. We expect to find that
virtues are important in creating positive cultures, to identify those virtues
most critical to that end, and to gather evidence for proposing a
cultures-of-integrity model.”
Honesty
- Building a Virtuous Cycle “From plagiarism, to infidelity, to
financial fraud, dishonesty seems to be a universal part of the world we live
in. This not only affects our sense of security and comfort, but also
discourages innovation and growth at the personal, professional, and societal
level. We have spent the last few years exploring this topic through the
(Dis)Honesty Project and a number of different initiatives: the documentary
feature film “(Dis)Honesty – The Truth About Lies,” a traveling installation
called the Truth Box, and the project’s digital properties including its own
website. We aim to broaden the project’s impact by extending its educational
work and creating targeted wraparound programming that engages individuals
around the topics of honesty, integrity, and trust in the contexts of their
lives. The programs encourage character development through dialogue,
demonstrations, and periodic reminders. With the support the John Templeton
Foundation, we will a) provide licenses for our film and its complementary
curriculum to schools and universities who otherwise could not afford them; b)
produce talkback discussions around the film for professional associations that
initiate meaningful exploration of dishonesty and ethical culture within
particular industries; and c) create and test a new approach to ethics training
in organizational settings that facilitates discussions around dishonesty and
provides periodic, consistent reminders to strengthen an ethical culture.
Through these programs, we can help individuals develop, value, and maintain an
honest, virtuous character and establish mechanisms and precedents that support
this endeavor, ultimately creating a virtuous cycle that advances honesty,
integrity and trust in the communities in which we live and work.”
Planning
Grant: A New, Holistic Paradigm for Undergraduate STEM Education: Inspiring Big
Questions by Cultivating Virtuous Scientists “As
universities have become more professionalized, a need has emerged to establish
mechanisms to restore open inquiry in science education. There is also a need
to provide an experience that exceeds the perceived limits of human thought
while fostering the boundless creativity and dynamism made possible by human
imagination and intellect. Through this planning grant, we will develop a
three-year implementation project to establish a new STEM educational
experience that will cultivate a habit of open-minded inquiry, develop those
virtues needed for substantive intellectual progress, and equip students with
the tools needed to actively create rather than passively absorb knowledge.”
Two Previous Funding Examples
Positive Psychology Center, University of
Pennsylvaniahttps://www.templeton.org/what-we-fund/grants/positive-psychology-research
--“Description:
These grants helped to establish the Positive Psychology Center. Positive
Psychology is the study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals
and communities to thrive. The Center promotes research, training, and
education. The field of Positive Psychology is founded on the belief that
people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best
within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play.
--Grant Amount: $2,199,500 Start Date: January 2001 End Date: August 2007”
Center for Christian Thought, Biola University
--“Description:
Though there are a multitude of Christian scholars in different fields working
on the Big Questions – those questions of perennial human concern
about how we should live, what is real, what is beautiful, what is
good – there are few resources in the Christian academic world for
enabling interdisciplinary, collaborative work on these questions, and fewer
yet for translating such scholarship into formats accessible to a broader,
non-academic audience. Biola University's Center for Christian Thought (CCT)
will capitalize on this opportunity with the following main activities: Residential
Fellowships and visiting-scholar appointments to facilitate sustained,
interdisciplinary, collaborative research; Three RFPs, each focused on a timely
Big Question; Dedicated staff and web resources for the translation of this
scholarship to broad non-academic audiences; Yearly interdisciplinary
conferences; Pastor-in-residence program and regular pastors; luncheons; Annual
course-development competition; Public lectures and accessible resources
translating scholarly work on the Big Questions to broad, non-academic
audiences; Well-designed and well-networked website that will feature the work
of the Center Expected outputs and outcomes include: 12 book manuscripts,
36 journal articles, 3 edited volumes, 3 special-theme journal issues, 135
conference-paper submissions, 12 podcasts, 30 brief video interviews, 6 new
courses developed, 12 multi-view papers, 6 sermon series; 65 emerging and
established scholars networked, 3 conferences, 600 pastor-attendees at 3
pastors' luncheons, 6 senior-scholar public lectures with 600 attendees.
Plausible enduring impacts include: Increased emphasis on interdisciplinary
approaches to the Big Questions among Christian scholars; Decreased
anti-intellectualism in evangelical Christian culture; Significant progress in
knowledge concerning our three focal themes.
--Grant Amount: $3,029,221 Start Date: July 2012 End Date: June 2015”
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