About

Mission

Our mission is to provide innovative and transformative educational opportunities for underserved communities that positively enhance life chances by preparing learners to enter a robust, technologically advanced workforce in South Carolina and beyond.

The B.E.S.T. Lives Center (BLC) is a state-of-the-art learning hub that focuses on military families, former foster care, formerly incarcerated, and adult learners while remaining true to the mission of the College. The BLC addresses ongoing concerns regarding educational access, innovation, equity, connectivity, social mobility, workforce development, and employment. The BLC supports students who enter Benedict College with similar background characteristics and levels the playing field for all students, regardless of the pathway they took to the College.

Build the capacity of military, formerly incarcerated, former foster care and adult learners
in the state of South Carolina.
Engage students in a supportive environment that promotes personal and professional growth while challenging them to think critically about the world around them.
Strategically position our graduates for success by providing necessary support structures that ensures optimal learning, sustains long term academic, social and emotional wellbeing, and industry appropriate and competitive skills.
Transform the lives of highly vulnerable and underrepresented South Carolinians by providing access to innovative educational and training opportunities that will prepare them to achieve full economic self-sufficiency.

Guiding Principles

The current higher education system validates particular types of learning and experiences over others, creating inequitable structures, and hindering educational advancement and opportunity of student populations, particularly historically underserved populations, vulnerable communities, and adult learners. We believe learning occurs, is reinforced, and developed in a variety of spaces and places including life experiences, work, and structured and unstructured educational opportunities and experiences. Moreover, we believe it is important, even vital for students to have opportunities to practice and apply their skills in actual situations and be recognized for using these skills in a variety of settings.
To enable social emotional learning (SEL) from a variety of spaces, competencies — along with intentional educational design aligned to various outcomes (e.g. work opportunities, professional credentials, graduate degree programs, etc.)—should be transparent to learners and widely discoverable. Such clarity ensures that pathways of attainment are clear and accessible for the learners they strive to serve. Further, it requires a deep understanding of who our learners are such that we can best support their success. It also requires a focus on enabling learner agency and control of their learning to put forward documentation of what they know and can do, regardless of where they may have acquired such knowledge and skills, in ways that are translatable and widely accepted as valid.
We are aware that to foster such an environment requires system-wide and structural changes and redefinitions of service provider roles. In essence, a reimagining and revisioning of partnerships within institutions of postsecondary education as well as between education providers, employers, technology providers, and military to name a few. The creation of the system of the future that celebrates and empowers nontraditional learning from a variety of spaces cannot be developed or supported in isolation—it must be done in partnership with other stakeholders and organizations working together to ensure responsiveness for students by meeting them where they are.

Our Guiding Principles sets our intentions regarding direct services to individuals that enhance employment opportunities and influences continuous evaluation of our processes. We are committed to providing social emotional learning, culturally relevant practices, and equity of learning where military families, former foster care recipients, formerly incarcerated individuals, and adult learners are prioritized and inspired to thrive. To this end, the BLC will be a best-inclass resource center that enhances employment opportunities for vulnerable and diverse learners who are desirous of participating in and contributing to South Carolina’s workforce.