Endowment Established in Memory South Africa RPCVs Scott and Barbara Kloeck-Jenson
Endowment Established in Memory or a Family Dedicated to World Peace
Madison, WI, January 9, 2002 --
St. Olaf College founded the Kloeck-Jenson Endowment for Peace and Justice, a $700,000 effort funded by friends and family of Scott and Barbara Kloeck-Jenson. Scott was a St. Olaf graduate. He and Barbara died in 1999, along with their two children, in a car accident in South Africa. At the time of his death, Scott was a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and was managing a research project in Mozambique for the University’s Land Tenure Center.
Through service in the Peace Corps and later through their work in Africa, Scott and Barbara proved themselves to be dedicated to world peace and justice. The endowment honors this legacy of theirs by providing opportunities for students and faculty at St. Olaf in the areas of peace and justice studies.
"Scott and Barbara’s lives were a confirmation of what we hoped the Peace Corps and its volunteers would be," wrote Sargent Shriver, one of the founders of Peace Corps, in a letter delivered to Minnesota Congressman Arlen Erdahl and read at the endowment ceremony.
The endowment will be used to hire professors to teach peace and justice courses, bring speakers to St. Olaf, build the peace and justice curriculum, and help students study overseas. It also will provide support for the Peace Prize Forum, an annual event that seeks to increase the visibility of the Nobel Peace Prize in the United States.
Through these efforts, the Kloeck-Jenson Endowment for Peace and Justice hopes to inspire students and faculty to strive to improve global equality, much as Scott and Barbara dedicated their lives to doing.
