From 1995-2010 the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC) operated a Global Issues Honors Consortium, with funding from the Mellon and McArthur Foundations. This program enabled students from Spelman, Morehouse, Clark Atlanta, Morris Brown, and Tougaloo Colleges and Dillard and Chicago State Universities to participate in a coordinated set of activities over two years to prepare them for graduate school with an international focus. The program included academic seminars on home campuses linked to other campuses via ITV and WebCT, an intensive summer workshop, a community service learning project, a study abroad experience, and intensive mentoring. It culminated in a capstone seminar during which students presented the results of their original research and writing projects. Many of the 165 students who participated in this program subsequently completed graduate studies in fields ranging from public policy to medicine and law.

In 2017-2018, a group of U of MN faculty attempted to revive this earlier successful program by securing a College of Liberal Arts grant to help create a more diverse and inclusive student body via a partnership with Spelman College, Morehouse College, and Howard University. The funding enabled department Chairs and faculty from these three institutions to visit the U of MN campus and meet with faculty, students, and administrators to discuss graduate and professional degree programs. It also enabled U of MN faculty to visit Atlanta and Washington, D.C. to discuss future possibilities for deepening the partnership, including conferences and student and faculty exchanges, and to learn about graduate and professional opportunities at Howard University.

The College of Liberal awarded a Fall 2019-Spring 2021 ICW grant to faculty members in the Departments of History, African & African American Studies, Sociology, and Political Science to continue the partnership with Spelman, Morehouse, and Howard by focusing on public scholarship, which has been a central commitment of our four institutions for decades. After a national conference on “Threats to Democracy in Times of Populism and Racial Nationalism” was postponed due to COVID-19, we decided to organize a series of Fall 2020 online workshops on the themes of "Art and Protest," “Higher Education in Prisons,” “Voting Rights and Voter Suppression,” “Environmental Justice and Pandemics,” and “Voices of Veteran Activists from Atlanta, D.C., and Minneapolis.” Following the murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. and around the globe, we decided to act quickly to organize summer 2020 online racial justice teach-ins on policing and protest, with engaged faculty, student activists, and community leaders from each of our three cities. In the Spring of 2021, in the weeks leading up the the Derek Chain trial for the murder of George Floyd, we again partnered with our collegiate and community partners on two teach-ins exploring criminal justice and social justice protest a year after the 2020 uprisings.