Nelson Institute Academic Programs Fund

This fund provides general scholarship support for undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in one or more of the Nelson Institute’s certificate or degree programs.

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With your support of the Academic Programs Fund, you allow the Nelson Institute and its academic leadership team to continue to revolutionize the field of environmental studies and practice the Wisconsin Idea to 2020 and beyond.

Specifically, your gifts provide the Nelson Institute Associate Director for Research and Education (who oversees all of our graduate and undergraduate program offerings) with much-needed resources that allow him the flexibility to address pressing or emergent needs as well as the ability to pursue new opportunities as they arise. This fund is also used to provide general scholarship support to students in our undergraduate and graduate degree and certificate programs.

Named for Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson (former Senator and Governor from Wisconsin), the Nelson Institute has been an incubator, laboratory, and model of collaborative education, research, and public service for almost 50 years.

Interdisciplinary by design, the Nelson Institute gathers the best and brightest from all corners of the university – scientists, engineers, heath and legal experts along with economists, historians, ethicists and political scholars, and more. It also reaches beyond the campus to build partnerships with stakeholders in government, business, the nonprofit sector, other academic institutions, and communities within the State of Wisconsin and around the globe.

We teach environmental skills for a changing world, integrate diverse areas of research and discovery, translate complex scholarship into intuitive action, and engage the public and their priorities and concerns (such as jobs, food, and justice). This approach benefits not just our students, but the people of the state and the world.