Franciscan Friends
Hope and Justin ’99 Schneir
Hope (Batchelder) and Justin ’99 Schneir spearheaded the Unplugged Scholarship.
Chances are you’ve run into Hope (Batchelder) and Justin ’99 Schneir’s work somewhere.
Maybe you’ve picked up a bottle of their Tractor Beverage lemonade. Or heard one of their folk songs on Spotify. Maybe you’ve seen them on Life on the Rock or read about them in Newsweek, or Aleteia, or National Catholic Register.
Justin grew up in California; Hope in Vermont. They met as students at Franciscan, at a party at Justin’s house. They played music together that night, and today “Hope and Justin” is an award-winning songwriting duo and folk band. Their music is honest and existential and joyous all at once. They have five albums, the newest released in January, even though their music is just a hobby.
They are mom and dad to nine children.
They’re successful entrepreneurs. Tractor Beverage, for instance, is one of North America’s fastest-growing beverage brands and made Fast Company’s 2021 list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies and 2022 Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in America. Beyond organic beverages, Justin says Tractor is on a “mission” to eliminate toxins from the global food system.
Justin and Hope are generous philanthropists. For instance, Justin and his partners are developing a foundation to help farmers convert to organic practices.
A more recent endeavor, spearheaded by the Schneirs, is the innovative Unplugged Scholarship. Franciscan University students who agree to do without smartphones during their undergraduate career can compete for $5,000 a year in financial aid.
Recipients can use computers, laptops, and iPads. They can even use cellular phones for calling and texting, as long as those phones can’t connect to the internet. So, no social media apps, no web surfing or video watching on the phone.
“That means you don’t have social media in your pocket, and you don’t have pornography in your pocket,” says Hope.
It also means being fine with getting bored. It means being present to the people you’re with. It means engaging with reality, reclaiming the part of ourselves that we’ve allowed our phones to suck out of us.
Hope and Justin got the idea after a visit to Wyoming Catholic College, which has a no-cellphone culture. It was refreshing to see students at a coffee shop actually conversing with one another, instead of being absorbed in their individual screens, they say. Thus the Unplugged Scholarship was born, as an attempt to bring that culture to Franciscan.
The Schneirs and other Franciscan alumni contributed enough to fund the scholarship for 30 students this year.
“Our hope is that, in time, there will be enough funding to supply an Unplugged Scholarship to every student who wants one,” says Justin. “We want to start a movement that might extend beyond Franciscan University. We are looking for partners who will come alongside and help make this scholarship more widely available.”
The response, Hope and Justin say, was beautiful. Almost 170 students applied for the scholarship. Thirty were chosen, but 50 more gave up their smartphones even without the financial incentive. Moreover, other students who’ve kept their phones are striving to have healthier relationships with their devices.
What these students are doing is hard. The students themselves, however, talk less about what they’ve given up and more about what they’ve gained. Scholarship recipient Austin Doty notes that he has more time to do things. He’s making things out of wood, and he’s writing stories. Instead of watching YouTube before falling asleep at night, he’s reading a couple of chapters of a book. It’s more often an inconvenience for others than for him, he says.
Is it crazy to think that today’s generation of college students will voluntarily give up their smartphones? Hope and Justin sing about another man who was similarly foolish in the eyes of the world, but answered the Lord’s invitation:
Crazy man, they say,
hand building the Church with stone and clay…
(Faithful and True, “Walkin’ Down”).
