ECG Apprenticeship in Virtue-Rooted Leadership
A virtue-rooted leadership program for undergraduate students, the ECG Apprenticeship was developed to deepen the ethical formation of the Notre Dame community.
Open to any class year, the ECG Apprenticeship program is a yearlong leadership formation experience that explores and develops intentional habits of life. The program attends to the weighty aspirations that we have for ourselves as leaders and explores practices meant to help close the gap between those aspirations and where we are currently. Coupling students’ leadership capacity with a deep commitment to the cultivation of virtue, the ECG Apprentices learn to face the ethical challenges of their life and leadership with love, moral courage, integrity, and a wide generosity of spirit.
Program Details
First year program:
- Students engage weekly sessions designed around a curriculum helping them gain vision—and practice habits—for becoming the kind of leader they aspire to be: One who can lead with strong character and enact positive social change in service of the common good. Sessions are on Friday afternoons and full participation is a condition of acceptance to the apprenticeship.
- Lead a Common Good Life Circle, a first-year mentoring program. Apprentices identify and invite a small group of first year students to participate in a bi-monthly group focused on compelling questions about ethics in everyday life.
- Collaborate on campus-wide programs. Apprentices work together, and with ECG staff, to host a series of campus-wide events that explore urgent moral questions.
- Attend two retreats focused on community building, reflection/contemplation, and topics related to the personal life of a “common good leader.”
Second year program:
- Students who participate in the first year Apprenticeship program are eligible to apply for second year Apprenticeship which builds on the first year through a leadership opportunity at ECG. (Examples include leadership within first year Apprenticeship program, TA responsibilities for ND courses on virtue and leadership, coaching and supporting the Common Good Life Circles program, and leading campus event programming as listed above, among other things.)
- Students are paired with a campus mentor who invests in each apprentice and helps them discern vision for their life and leadership.
