Kenan-Biddle partnership nets 91 apps

A new collaborative effort providing funding to students at Duke and UNC received 91 applications, Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta confirmed in an e-mail yesterday.

The Kenan-Biddle Partnership is a $150,000 initiative that will distribute up to $50,000 annually over three years to projects at Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that encourage interaction between the two campuses. Grants will be distributed in grants of about $5,000. The initiative’s deadline was extended to Nov. 22 after no applications had been submitted as the original Nov. 15 deadline approached and several students requested extensions.

“It’s huge, especially given that the mission of this grant, which is to create cross-university partnerships,” said Duke Student Government President Mike Lefevre, a senior who will serve on the committee that will select which proposals to fund. “There are a lot of grant partnerships at Duke and UNC separately, but this is the first entrepreneurial initiative that actually challenges applicants to deal with both campuses. Having 90 [applicants] far exceeds my expectations.”

The selection committee will meet in Chapel Hill Dec. 6. Among the administrators that will represent Duke are Moneta and Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Donna Lisker, Lefevre said. Senior Hogan Medlin, student body president at UNC, will be among his school’s representatives on the committee.

“I don’t want to go in with any preconceived notions of what I want. On the other hand, it’d be good to see applications that go beyond programming—that is pretty easy and there are already ways to have programming,” Lefevre said.

Moneta wrote in an e-mail that he could not share information about specific proposals but will announce the winners when they are selected.

The partnership is funded by the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust and the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, according to a Duke news release.