Emory University’s Center for Ethics is experienced in convening and facilitating difficult conversations across many subjects and for diverse communities. Art - whether it is film, theater, or the visual arts - has proven to be a unique and powerful catalyst that prompts us to confront ethical challenges. Our aim is to engage in ethical dialogue in ways that are both supportive of peoples’ differences and challenging to their preconceptions.

The Center’s Ethics and the Arts Program continues to bring superlative interactive programs to the Emory and Atlanta communities. Through the arts, we create opportunities for disparate communities, partner organizations, students, artists, scholars, and the public to come together for meaningful and respectful dialogue that results in an action plan for collective social change.

A generous gift to 2O36 will allow us to create an Endowed Program Leader in Arts and Ethics to ensure the Center for Ethics remains the Emory pacesetter in guided conversations and programming that lead to ethical literacy and social justice.

Comprehensive, cross-disciplinary training for clinicians leads to better patient outcomes. Thus, we have a duty to educate physicians and health care workers in ethical issues around science, health care systems, and clinical care. This is a key commitment of the Center for Ethics—our curriculum encompasses the health sciences, scholarship and research in clinical ethics, public health ethics, health policy, and neuroethics.

The pandemic has created unprecedented demand for these programs and with that demand comes increased faculty need. Increased funding through 2036 will allow the center to expand the faculty through an Endowed Bioethics Program Leader who will support outreach to students and the wider healthcare community, provide greater access to this crucial program, and allow us to increase the scope of our most prominent bioethics programs.

Community outreach is a cornerstone of Emory’s commitment to society, and it helps students, professionals, and the public confront and understand ethical issues in health, technology, the arts, the environment, and the life sciences. The Center for Ethics fosters public discussion and experiential learning through community engagement activities and outreach.

In our programs, students and community members engage with ongoing and emerging issues in food studies, health care, social justice, the arts, and more. In and out of classrooms, they’re free to address complex ethical and social challenges in civil discussion and debate that elevates public discourse and increases mutual understanding. Funding would ensure the continuation and expansion of these in-demand signature programs, both at Emory and in the Atlanta area. The hope is that they lead to deeper civic understanding and more civil discourse in a world that so desperately needs them.