$1 million gift gives CLS a flexible foundation for student support
May 15, 2025 — Over the last decade, the Center for Careers, Life, and Service (CLS) has transformed into a comprehensive, high-impact program that supports students from the time they arrive at Grinnell College to the time they launch their careers.
Penny Sebring, a former Grinnell trustee, and her husband, Chuck Lewis, have been instrumental in envisioning and supporting this transformation into a more modern approach to career exploration and preparation. The couple’s latest gift of $1 million establishes an endowment that will provide CLS greater flexibility and ensure it can readily embrace new opportunities for supporting students.
Penny Bender Sebring ’64, H’15 and Charles Ashby Lewis H’15
Prior to this gift and beginning in 2013, Penny and Chuck contributed a total of $1.4 million to establish and sustain the College’s first career community in Education Professions. The creation of Ed Pros caught the attention of other donors and served as a catalyst and model for the introduction of subsequent career communities. In 2016, the couple gave $450,000 to initiate the Business and Finance Career Community.
“Penny and Chuck have played such a consequential role helping launch this model in the last 14 years; I don’t think it would exist without their direct involvement, which has extended beyond their financial support,” says Mark Peltz, Daniel and Patricia Jipp Finkelman Dean of Careers, Life, and Service, who began discussing the CLS model with the couple in 2011. “The flexibility of this new endowment means we can deploy the proceeds in ways that address our most pressing priorities today and redirect it to other priorities in an unknown future.”
Since the Career Development Office and Office for Social Commitment were combined to form the CLS in 2013, the CLS has utilized specialized advising and programming services to engage students in translating their liberal arts degrees into productive lives. The Center’s current strategic focus is increasing the number of students who participate in internships and research experiences. Initially, the new fund will help students who need financial support to take advantage of these crucial career-enhancing opportunities. This is particularly important for low-income students, who may not otherwise have the social capital required to connect to these opportunities.
Gracie Brandsgard ’14, director of the Government, Law, and Policy Career Community, meets with Chikako Inoue ’27. Career communities offer specialized advising and programing.
Peltz says the Center’s work in building social capital and closing opportunity gaps has helped students realize social and economic mobility after graduation. Grinnell graduates consistently earn promising positions with companies, are accepted into high-quality graduate and professional programs, and participate in experiential learning.
Though she graduated long before the current CLS model existed, Sebring has had a values-centered approach to life after Grinnell. When a recruiter from the Peace Corps was at the College her senior year, she was inspired to sign up. With her colleagues, she created an urban community development project in a Venezuelan barrio, where she worked alongside community members to dig ditches and lay pipes for a sewer system and run summer camps for kids. She saw the impact of community education and hands on action on the long-term health of the community.
That formative experience instilled a desire to be an educator. After four years teaching high school social studies, Sebring earned her doctorate in education and social policy at Northwestern University. She co-founded the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research 35 years ago and still works there as a senior leader. The Consortium conducts its research almost exclusively with the Chicago Public Schools, taking a community-engaged and solutions-focused approach to research.
A 2024 Education Professions Career Community workshop focused on mental health educational careers.
“Penny’s work in Chicago gives us a sense of urgency for recruiting more teachers from the best colleges,” Lewis says. “Top liberal arts schools like Grinnell do an outstanding job of providing students with a strong academic and social foundation.”
That urgency motivated the couple to establish and continually support Ed Pros to elevate the status of education in the minds of students. Through mentorships, workshops, skills training, treks, and conferences, Ed Pros prepares students for careers ranging from teaching to administration, policy making to social work, and research. Ed Pros has helped build strong friendships and formal and informal mentoring relationships based on their shared interests in education.
Sebring and Lewis, an Amherst College alumnus and life trustee, are ardent believers in the importance of intentional career development. In addition to Grinnell, they have also invested in this work at Amherst and the University of Chicago, where Chuck was also a trustee, and leveraged their networks to support these innovations. Career leaders at the three colleges have collaborated for over a decade to share programmatic ideas and solve common problems.
“Career support is such a key part of helping students get launched after they finish their college education,” Sebring says. “We want CLS to continue to thrive and enable our young people to explore and plan for their careers.”
—by Kim Kobersmith