Stories - Ignatian Center - Santa Clara University

Bannan Mission Integration Grants | Putting Our Mission into Action

The Ignatian Center's Bannan Forum awards grants to faculty and staff each year to support integration of the mission and tradition of Santa Clara University into their teaching, research, or programs. In addition, the grants seek to promote and make accessible the Jesuit intellectual heritage, bringing it to bear on contemporary global realities, and to encourage intellectual discourse among faculty, staff, and students.

Projects can take various forms, such as curriculum and course development; research and writing; and mission-based programming and initiatives targeted at students, faculty, staff, and/or the wider community.

Vania Tong, Associate Director for Career Development and Campus Integration (STEM) used a grant to create a program on vocational discernment. According to Vania, the grant played a pivotal role in reshaping and expanding the traditional Jesuit “Vocation Discernment” retreat into a "Career Clarity" retreat. The program, rooted in “cura personalis” and a first-of-its-kind collaboration among the SCU Career Center, Campus Ministry, and Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), weaves together career development, spirituality, and mental health support to achieve four main objectives:

build community among peers who share similar struggles and/or who are at a similar juncture in their vocation discernment process (“You Are Not Alone”)
develop tools and a practice for leaning into ambiguity and change/transitions in a proactive manner (”Proactive Ambiguity”)
discover and apply language that describes your current state of mind, strengths, and values as they relate to career, your future; and positive self talk (“Words to Speak”)
kickstart the vocation discernment process in a structured, supportive manner (“Springboard for Action”)

With this grant, the retreat successfully hosted 20 students in 2024, leading to impressive outcomes where 94% of students reported an increase in career confidence, 100% of attendees expressed feelings of ease, relief, and reduced negative emotions, and 95% said they felt supported by those they met at the retreat. The grant also opened the door to additional funding from Mission & Ministry, enabling the expansion of the program to 26 participants in 2025 and offering a blueprint for future retreats across the university.

One student wrote, “I wanted to leave [the retreat] with a greater sense of clarity, and I did, but not in the way I expected. I expected to leave with ‘the answers’ - but instead, I am leaving with the tools to help me explore the answers and act on them. I think that is so valuable and helps build self-confidence, self-efficacy, and broader life skills.”

Tom Plante, the Augustin Cardinal Bea, S.J. University Professor in the Department of Psychology and a long-time collaborator with the Ignatian Center, used a recent grant to conduct research into a key practice of Ignatian Spirituality, the Examen. As with many of the Bannan Grants, the grant supported a collaborative project that brought together faculty and staff from across the University. Dave Feldman, Professor of Counseling Psychology in the School of Education and Counseling Psychology, and Tony Cortese, Director of Ignatian Spirituality in the Ignatian Center, were partners in conducting the trial and authoring the recently published paper. This collaborative research team sought to better understand the impact of the Examen, the five-step reflection and prayer practice developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola. Through questionnaires measuring hope, life meaning, satisfaction with life, mindfulness, compassion, stress, anxiety, and depression, the research team found significant differences for the measures of life meaning, satisfaction with life, and hope between those who were using the examen-based practice and those in the control group. The results suggest that the examen-based practice produced improvements in individuals’ global evaluations of their lives as well as their perceptions of the future. The grant funds helped to run the trial and for a graduate assistant to organize the data that was critical to the paper’s completion.

While funding from the Bannan Forum is critical to ensure that mission-centric projects have the resources and support they need to thrive at SCU, it is the efforts of individuals and teams across the institution that bring the mission to life. Our staff and faculty have creative and highly effective ways of putting the mission into action and we are grateful to be partners and supporters of this important work.

Jan 28, 2025