Alma Project Announces Cohort of Alma Senior Faculty Fellows

Annie Abbott (Spanish), Alexandra Chronopoulou (Statistics) and Andrew Moss (English) from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences have been selected as Alma Senior Faculty Fellows at the newly launched Alma Project, an initiative by the College of Education.  

The “Alma Project: Promoting Neighborliness at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign” seeks to create, support, and sustain a culture of neighborliness at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign through dozens of community-engaged learning courses where students develop the character virtue of neighborliness. A collaborative initiative with the University of Birmingham’s Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, the program is funded by a three-year, $913,000 Institutional Impact Grant from the Educating Character Initiative, a project of the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University. The Educating Character Initiative is funded by Lilly Endowment Inc. Illinois is one of only nine land-grant universities and 49 institutions overall to receive funding for character education initiatives on their campuses. 

Selected after a competitive application process, the Senior Faculty Fellows will work closely with the Alma Team to design neighborliness reflections and workshop content for future fellows. They will also pilot newly developed neighborliness content into their existing community-engaged courses during the spring 2027 semester. Their contributions will help shape the project for future Alma Fellows cohorts—including the 27/28 cohort, for which applications are open until November 30.  

Abbott, Chronopoulou, and Moss’ applications resonated with the committee due to their experience in implementing community-engaged practices, their long-standing community relationships, and their thoughtful ideas about integrating neighborliness content. Their courses share a common goal—to nurture mutually beneficial relationships between Illinois students and the Champaign-Urbana community—while collaborating in diverse ways, like working alongside local Spanish-speaking and immigrant organizations, offering statistical consulting to C-U nonprofits, and providing grant-writing services to local organizations.  

Abbott, who has been offering Spanish in the Community continuously for twenty-one years, recalls how her students often ask her about similar courses available at Illinois— a question she doesn’t always have an answer for. Her course examines issues that affect the Latinx community from the national to the local level, bringing students into contact with the local Latinx community through volunteering opportunities in local organizations and schools. A long-standing champion of community-engaged learning, Abbott describes how “in my years of doing community-engaged pedagogy, I have seen many courses come and go, so I am particularly interested in working with everyone in the Alma Project to help foster multiple and sustainable courses. To do that requires motivating, mentoring and rewarding the faculty who take on this important task.”  

For Moss, the conceptual framework of “neighborliness” offered both an anchor and a challenge for his Effective Grant Writing course: “Neighborliness, we think, connotes both an ethic—an attitude and moral position in a community—but also an ecosystem—of forces, people, communication, problems, information, and solutions—where we want our student writers to intervene now with their grant writing and later, as they enter the world." His course, part of the Program in Professional Writing, introduces students to the genre conventions of grants and provides real-life experience by pairing them with local nonprofits.  

After fifteen years of teaching statistics, community-engaged learning helped Chronopoulou bring something to the class that she felt was previously missing: “the connection of the classroom to the local community and the civic and ethical growth of the students." In her Statistical Consulting course, students provide consulting services  to real-life clients, a diverse combination of community partners and researchers across campus. The success of this experience has brought back StatCom, a pro-bono student organization who offers their services to local organizations as well as educational and governmental institutions. At the moment, StatCom has a membership of over 80 undergraduate and graduate students.  

The Alma Project team is led by principal investigators Chris Napolitano and Kaylin Ratner, in Educational Psychology, College of Education Dean Chrystalla Mouza, director of public engagement Emily Stone, and postdoctoral researcher Lázaro García-Angulo. They are excited to work alongside this exceptional cohort of Senior Faculty Fellows.