Virtues of Wonder (VOWS): A Seedbed for Discovery and Healing (planning grant)

This planning grant project addresses the need to establish rigorous, feasible plans for implementing on a 3-year scale the Virtues of Wonder (VOWs) project proposed in our April 2012 Online Funding Inquiry (OFI). Specific planning activities would include the development of plans for research, fellowships, educational interventions, conferences, media, and co-funding for the main VOWs project. Outputs would be draft plans and background documents designed to inform a subsequent full proposal for VOWs. The main eventual outcome would be our full VOWs proposal, most likely to be submitted in the late spring of 2014. The potential enduring impacts are those that we envision resulting from the VOWs project itself, in combination with subsequent post-VOWS activities to be funded by other sources in later years: a demonstration of the value, for educational institutions at all levels, of adopting specific practices to realize more fully students’ intellectual, emotional and spiritual potential as discoverers and healers. Through the eventual VOWs project and subsequent activities, this planning grant has the potential to lead to far-reaching transformations in the education of talented youth, undergraduate science (and pre-medical) education, the training of physicians and nurses, the well-being and effectiveness of clinicians, the quality of patient care, and the resilience of the health care workforce.