Welcome to Mile Markers, a bimonthly newsletter about rural higher education. I’m Nick Fouriezos, an Open Campus national reporter who grew up at the crossroads of suburban Atlanta and the foothills of Appalachia.

Today’s Roadmap

01: Postcards: From beehives to climbing garages

01: Postcards

Blackburn College in southern Illinois has its particular charms. 

One of just 10 federally recognized “work colleges” — institutions that operate a mandatory student work program as a central part of their educational philosophy — about half its buildings were built by the students themselves over the years. 

That’s even more impressive when you consider that its population includes just a few hundred students … and about 600,000 bees, whose honey they help harvest.

“If we could all act as a hive, we would all be in a better place,” their president, Larry Lee, likes to say.

Those unique charms were recently showcased by the college in a “Mapping Belonging” project, using funding from the Endeavor Foundation to also renovate its counseling center and train a third of its faculty in Mental Health First Aid.

Their efforts are part of an $8.5 million effort to scale student well-being at 10 small liberal arts colleges across America, six of which are considered rural-serving institutions by the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges.

For the last two years, those colleges have been sharing notes, testing ideas, and even forming partnerships to help improve wellness and mental health on campuses that often have little resources to support such services. 

“It’s transformed our delivery mechanism and enhanced our retention,” Lee says. “In thirty years in higher education, I’ve never benefited or learned more from such a shared collective.” 

At College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, students distributed hand-drawn maps that highlighted not just buildings but also hiking trails, meditation spots, and community coffee shops within five miles of campus.

Through the lab, the college also renovated a three-bay garage into a bouldering shed and had students work together to build a permanent campus sauna, in addition to adding resources like a 24/7 telehealth service and a peer coaching program. 

The Endeavor Lab Colleges include: Antioch College (Ohio), Bennington College (Vermont), Blackburn College (Illinois), College of the Atlantic (Maine), Prescott College (Arizona), Randolph College (Virginia), St. John's College (Maryland and New Mexico), Sterling College (Vermont), and Warren Wilson College (North Carolina). Northland College (Wisconsin) participated in Phase I but closed in 2025.

Creative solutions to rural mental health gaps

The collaboration addresses a persistent problem in rural higher education: Most mental health and wellness programs are designed for large universities and don't scale down effectively to small, resource-constrained institutions.

"This is where collaboration, not competition, is serving us best," says Lori Collins-Hall, the project director of the Endeavor Lab Colleges program. "Not all models, especially those implemented and researched on larger campuses, are scalable to the constraints and staff of small higher education."

Such sharing isn’t so common among small liberal arts colleges that, despite spanning wide geographies, may feel like they’re competing for the same students — along with Blackburn College, Sterling College and Warren Wilson College are also federal work colleges.

[Read more: Nearly a year after Helene, a private college in western N.C. is still recovering]

These institutions are sharing intellectual property, successful programs, and even staff training across what would normally be competitive boundaries.

Some were doing so under trying circumstances: even as it faced closure this past spring, Northland College created a $2,500 mini-grant to support its students, faculty, and workers as they processed its final academic year.

As Lee notes, programs that support small rural colleges like the Endeavor Lab are rare, yet have an outsize impact on their local communities.

“It’s one thing to just try to recruit students to a rural community, but as a college, we are also the lifeblood of our region. If something happens to this college, our community would falter.” 

Working within the rural context

What emerges from these examples is a vision of rural liberal arts education that leverages what might traditionally be seen as limitations — small size, remote location, limited resources — as strengths for mental health support.

"Small liberal arts colleges cultivate relationships and foster community, buffering students from isolation and loneliness," the consortium notes in their materials. These campuses "emphasize a strong sense of belonging" and "nurture students' passion, balance, integrity, vision, and collective responsibility."

But the collaboration also recognizes the unique challenges of rural mental health support. Many of these communities lack adequate mental health services, and students often arrive at college without having had access to mental health resources in their home communities.

"A lot of this work recognizes the dearth of mental health supports and services in rural communities," Collins-Hall explains. The initiative emphasizes that "we're not going to counsel our way out of this" and instead focuses on building preventative skills and community-wide approaches to wellness.

Scaling the unscalable

Rurality has some shared traits, yet often feels very different based on geography, often making it difficult to scale such programs. 

Being able to draw insights from other disparate colleges, while still retaining a local touch, could be a solution. 

For instance, both College of the Atlantic and Sterling College developed mapping projects, but they look completely different. 

The former created ornate physical maps because of limitations around cell phone service on their campus, while the latter developed a sophisticated digital story map that incorporates geographic-information technology and years of ecological research.

Throughout the program’s first two years, the colleges share detailed implementation guides, budget breakdowns, and lessons learned through a collaborative knowledge base. 

When Blackburn College implements acceptance and commitment therapy training, other campuses can access their materials and adapt them. 

When Warren Wilson develops specific programming for Black male students, their approaches become available to the entire consortium.

Looking forward

As the Endeavor Lab Colleges enter phase two, the consortium plans to fully integrate all five initiatives — from curriculum work and mapping initiatives to nature and art-based wellness programs — across its remaining nine campuses.

Some early indicators are promising. Sterling College reported that 2025 graduates scored particularly high (4.1 out of 5) on measures of belonging. 

Blackburn has seen significant improvements in retention, while the College of the Atlantic's emergency fund for students facing financial hardship helped address some of the top reasons students leave college.

In a landscape where small colleges face mounting financial and enrollment pressures, the Endeavor Lab Colleges could offer a blueprint for how small institutions can leverage their collective strength to serve students better than any of them could manage alone.

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