After you’ve found your Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday deals, #BSUGivingTuesday gives you the opportunity to give back to the academic community from which you emerged.

Consider donating to the Ball State English General Fund #2701 to ensure that our students and faculty continue to make a difference.

Keep reading to learn about a few of the projects which this fund has supported in the past year.

Alliance of Black and Latinx Teachers’ Black Educators Conference

Your gift allowed Alliance of Black and Latinx Teachers (ABLT) club officers and English education students to attend the Black Educator’s Conference with their faculty advisor to learn more about teaching Black and Latinx students in the K-12 classroom. They also helped promote our department, which houses the ABLT club, during the higher education recruitment afternoon.

“An Evening with Roxane Gay” during Women’s Week

In 2016, we partnered with six other departments and programs at Ball State to bring author Roxane Gay to campus to discuss her best-selling book Bad Feminist. Bringing well-known authors to campus exceeds our departmental budget, but your gifts make it possible for us to collaborate with others to make it happen. Gay’s visit had a profound effect on our students.

Getting Around in Ireland

Your gift provided English students on a field study in Ireland with Dr. Molly Ferguson with bus passes to help them get around. These bus passes allowed students to travel to exciting places like Wicklow Gap.

Indiana Women of Achievement Awards Dinner

Your gift paid for a group of women, all of them undergraduate English majors, to attend the Indiana Women of Achievement Awards dinner and to hear the stories of some of Indiana’s most accomplished women. These young women say they were honored to be nominated and to have the opportunity to attend an event like this one.

End-of-the-Year English Department Awards

Your gift helped to pay for the printing of the award certificates we give out at our annual awards ceremony to recognize the achievements of our talented students and graduating seniors.

Securing a Future–“You Majored in What?”

Your gift purchased 20 copies of this “careers for English majors” book, which we gave out as door prizes at our professionalization lecture series, “Stars to Steer By.” This book and the lecture series give our students direction as they search for a stable career.

Trip to Kent State Virginia Hamilton Conference

Previous donations allowed Dr. Lyn Jones and students Corinne Lankowicz, Ashya Thomas, Hannah Winters, Andrew Rosser, Kayla Veal, Amanda Underwood, Cassidy Langston, Eileen Porzuczek, Audrey Bowers, and Alex Stoltie to attend the Virginia Hamilton Conference at Kent State. This conference is the longest-running event in the United States to focus exclusively on multicultural literature for children and young adults.

Angela Davis Visit

Dr. Angela Davis spoke on “Institutional Racism in the Penal and Criminal Justice Systems” to mark the relaunch of Ball State’s African America Studies program, and as the keynote speaker of the 2017 Diversity Symposium. This free event was widely attended and made possible by your generous donations.

Why give?

We understand that times are tight. You’re probably getting inundated today with giving requests. We know that many of you are teachers or in other careers that aren’t exactly lucrative. You might think, “My money is just a drop in the bucket.”

But it’s not.

Because there are thousands of Ball State English alums out the world, and if even half of our alums gave just $10, we could do even more good work here at Ball State, in Muncie, and in Indiana.

The English General Fund #2701 is integral to the future of #bsuenglish. Click here to give. And if you gave last year, we thank you.