“Macon and I firmly believe that in the years and decades to come, students will be drawn to Longwood by the opportunity to have the types of experiences this program will create, and those experiences will have a profound impact on them,” said Joan Brock in a press release published on the Longwood website.
Longwood University alum, Joan Brock, and her now late husband, Macon Brock, announced on Nov. 17, 2016, they would be donating $5.9 million to the university, to be used for the Brock Endowment for Transformational Learning. That donation was and is the largest gift in Longwood’s history.
Joan graduate from Longwood in 1964. She and her late husband are acclaimed philanthropic and business leaders and dedicated Longwood supporters.
The Brock Experiences are a “growing group of immersive, citizenship-focused courses at sites around the United States.” The point of each program is not only to look deeper into the civic issue that’s getting discussed, but also giving students the chance to bring together different perspectives from various academic disciplines and work on finding solutions to the issue.
Vice President of Institutional Advancements Courtney Hodges’ job at Longwood is to be a “match maker.” She takes the donors wishes and dreams, and attempts to find the perfect match for their dream at Longwood.
Hodges said, “Joan and Macon said they wanted to do something that would be transformational for Longwood, so they asked us to bring them some ideas of needs or programs and projects that would be transformational for Longwood.”
Hodges also stated that the Brocks cared deeply about Longwood forming their students to be citizen leaders, where “young people are experienced to go out into the world, meet people who have opposing or alike views and opinions, and know how to interact with them; understand that there will be a civil discourse, but then find some common ground.”
Mission Statement
The Brock Endowment for Transformational Learning changes the lives of students through immersion experiences which cross boundaries, cultures, and disciplines, and which prepare students to tackle complex challenges in their communities and the nation as a whole. The Endowment will serve as the engine for creating a set of learning experiences genuinely unique to Longwood.
It will strengthen Longwood’s distinctive citizen leadership mission, creating and sustaining a culture in which every student expects and can receive a college education that is nothing less than life-changing.
Yellowstone was the first Brock experience course. It was originally started in 2006, and it “served as an unforgettable part of hundreds of students’ Longwood education.”
Professor of biology and dean of the Cormier Honors College for Citizen Scholars, Dr. Alix Fink, was part of the group that started the Yellowstone program and has been one of the many faculty members in charge of running it ever since. She, along with others, played a crucial part in getting the full Brock program started.
“In 2005, our provost at the time, Dr. Wayne McWee, was really involved in an organization called American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU). They link public schools like ours that have a mission to serve the people of a commonwealth,” Fink said. “They have this really interesting program called the American Democracy Project (ADP), which was developed to provide a way for those public institutions to have new and interesting ways for students to be engaged in key issues in our democracy.”
McWee was really interested in one of the programs entitled “The Stewardship of Public Lands.” The ADP offered a workshop for important academic administrators, also referred to as provosts, which McWee was a part of in 2005. Fink and her colleague, Dr. Scott Cole, professor in the department of History, Political Science, and Philosophy, attended the faculty version of the same workshop in the summer of 2005.
The goal of the workshop was “to figure out ways to integrate the stewardship of public lands into the DNA of the institution.” Fink and Cole realized, after looking into the program more for Longwood, this would fit under the general education goal 13 requirement for all students–English 400.
“When I think of the Brock Experiences, I think of tea bags; in Yellowstone, students are tea bags in hot water. Same goes for the students in Chesapeake or Arizona; they’re all tea bags in hot water,” Fink said. “I see that as a laboratory for work that you’ll do as a citizen later on. Because you practiced it in college, whether it’s talking about immigration on the front line, or talking about wolves and grizzlies on the front line of those issues, I hope then that those skills you used transfer to some hot issue at home that you want to work on and you want to explore.”
“When I think of the Brock Experiences, I think of tea bags; in Yellowstone, students are tea bags in hot water. Same goes for the students in Chesapeake or Arizona; they’re all tea bags in hot water,” Fink said.
Integrated Environmental Science senior, Jessica Newcomb, took part in the Yellowstone program in the summer of 2018. She said, “Traveling to the West not only showed me the beauty of the land, but also the intricate relationship among people and nature. I learned how to understand the locals’ perspectives on their beliefs regarding topics such as wolves, bears, and many other controversial topics.”
Newcomb continued to explain the controversies they were in Yellowstone to study. For example, wolves are not wanted because they kill the cattle which results in a loss of profit for the ranchers, but on the other hand, wolves are needed as apex predators to keep an ecological balance.
“When wolves were removed years ago, elk overpopulated the area and ate all of the willow, which led to a chair reaction of effects in the ecosystem,” Newcomb said. “This made locals realize they needed the wolves to maintain balance so they now keep a close watch on the population numbers.”
Director of Brock Experiences for Transformational Learning Josh Blakely, was another member who played a part in getting the program started and funded.
“The Yellow Stone program, [at the time the Brock program was started], was already in existence for 10 years, and that team had been very, very successful; they’d seen a lot of students come through; they’d seen a lot of success with students; they’d seen a lot of development with faculty and staff,” said Blakely. “It started to emerge that this could be a model on which we could build; we could build success for the future—for future versions of this.”
Prior to being the director of Brock Experiences, Blakely was an Assistant Dean of Residential Programs. Blakely now plays a vital role in handling all the finances for the Brock Experience programs. He uses the allotted budget for each year to fund each program, but also to help students be able to financially afford participating in the travel aspect of each program by offering scholarship opportunities.
“It’s incredibly valuable for students to be pushed to take the skills they learn in the classroom and apply them to complex real-world problems in a setting beyond campus. That will be one of the defining goals of the new programs we develop, too,” Blakely said. “For instance, at Yellowstone, statistics aren’t numbers in a math textbook—they illustrate problems that students can see and feel. It’s not someone lecturing, but it’s about talking to people, hearing their stories, and processing that information. And we are all trying to find solutions to these problems together.”
Blakely put together a White Paper “Theoretical Framework for Brock Experiences” which breaks down everything that is involved in putting together the Brock Experience programs and shows how the mission for Brock Experiences fits perfectly within the mission of Longwood.
In the two years that the Brock Experience programs have been running, there have been programs in Alaska, Arizona, Chesapeake, and Yellowstone, with programs in Boston and Colorado starting in summer 2018.
In late October 2018, Brock visited Longwood University to speak one-on-one with the some of the students and faculty who were a part of the Brock Experiences, including those who were part of the Arizona Borderlines Brock experience. The students that traveled to Arizona presented her a collection of their work that is on display on the second floor of Brock Hall–a building on campus dedicated to the Brocks in honor of their generous donation to the university.
After the students presented their work to Brock, they had the opportunity to sit with her and further discuss their experiences and the things they learned. Brock was impressed by the work the students had done, and shared her gratitude for their hard work with the students.
“I loved meeting the students and hearing their stories. Brock Experiences are more than I could have hoped for,” Brock said.
Brock Experience 