Connector Staff

The UMass Lowell Honors seminar Experimenting with Philanthropy/Birds of Change held its awards ceremony, where the Lowell Parks and Conservation Trust and Project LEARN were each awarded $5,000. James Canning, the UMass Lowell Honors College has gone from simply being an honors program to being its own college with its very own housing for freshman students. One of these new seminars is Philanthropy for Change.

The focus of the Philanthropy for Change course is to demonstrate to students how charities and nonprofits operate, and what kind of impact they can have on a community. A representative from Texas Christian University and their philanthropy course greatly influenced Canning to create our own UMass Lowell version.

Nancy Lippe, who previously taught a similar philanthropy course at Tufts, was enlisted to head the course. Students also created their own nonprofits, including riversocks.org, where socks are collected and given to the Lowell Transitional Center.

“The main goal of the class was to find charities the class wished to award $5,000,” Kilgo said.