AdventWord: Persist

December 23, 2018
Advent Reflections

St. Augustine’s University (SAU) in Raleigh, N.C., one of the Episcopal Church’s two Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), recently celebrated graduation and the 151st year of providing a quality undergraduate experience to young African-American women and men.

One of these young men was Kendrick Cunningham. Like many young people trying to make it through four years of the ever-costlier college experience these days, there were certainly hard times– but he was the first in his family to graduate from college, and his mom and grandmother were his biggest fans.

Cunningham was and is a very busy man. While at St. Augustine’s, he served as Student Body President and as a student trustee on the University’s Board of Trustees. Interested in sustainable energy and politics, Kendrick is currently encouraging young people to participate in the democratic process. While he continues to look at the possibility of attending law school, he is currently working as a youth development specialist at the Police Activities League in Charlotte, N.C. His story of opportunity, education, commitment, and service is one of numerous inspirational stories from St. Augustine’s University and Voorhees College.

Because of the generosity of Episcopalians, students like at SAU and Voorhees like Kendrick can afford an excellent education. The Episcopal Church is proud to support both of these institutions of higher learning. The Church’s Office of Development is continually seeking new sources of revenue for such worthy and important institutions, who sometimes struggle with funding challenges, scholarship needs and deferred maintenance challenges in ways that larger endowed public institutions do not.

[Consider honoring the life and witness of Blessed Absalom Jones, the first African-American Episcopal priest, on his feast day, February 13.]

Your gift to the Episcopal Church’s Annual Appeal makes this work, as well as many of our other programs and initiatives, possible. We invite you to celebrate and support our two schools by giving to the HBCUs online here.