Wild Hope Project ~ Exploring Vocaton at PLU

THE WILD HOPE PROJECT : EXPLORING VOCATION AT PACIFIC LUTHERAN UNIVERSITY

Wild Hope invites students to ponder, “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?”* “Wild” because so much is possible and unpredictable and the complexities of the world are so great, and “precious” because the life of each individual student vitally matters and is full of promise.

Funded by the Lilly Endowment, Inc., the Wild Hope project is a 2 million dollar wager that improving the quality of reflection on vocation—meaning and purpose—will contribute to PLU's being a more intellectually rigorous, developmentally astute, theologically rich, and world-informed environment for students, and so a place that better helps them to become the mature, thoughtful, contextually aware, committed, creative leaders the world needs.

Wild Hope will accomplish its goals through an array of initiatives from 2003 through 2008 that:

• Challenge all in the university to grapple with vocation in an intellectually rich and world-engaged way
• Nurture students appropriately to claim meaning and purpose for their lives
• Cultivate faculty and staff to become more reflective, to acquire greater competence in facilitating reflection as appropriate in their areas, and to discover the resources of the university's Lutheran heritage for this task.

Throughout all its activities, Wild Hope integrates four areas of development—the life of the mind (intellect and imagination), connection to the larger world, personal development, and faith or spirituality.

The project aims to cultivate an extravagantly rich culture of creative reflection for courageous action. Such a culture will transform the university into a more robust mentoring environment to achieve its mission— to educate students for lives of thoughtful inquiry, service, leadership, and care—for persons, for communities, and for the earth.