For the past twenty years, community-based college success programs have supported a generation of young people entering all twenty-five City University of New York (CUNY) Colleges. As the country’s largest urban university system, CUNY has historically been a major engine of economic mobility for young people in New York City. However, gaps in academic preparation and navigational support have weakened student’s rates of persistence and graduation. Community-based organizations (CBOs) who have provided college access support to New York City public school students since the 1980’s, began following their young people into college to provide targeted interventions and improve student outcomes. Grounded in positive youth development, CBO college success programs leverage a wide range of resources to provide wrap-around services and empower their participants to mentor their peers. As an ecosystem of practitioners, they also openly collaborate, develop partnerships, and form coalitions to address institutional barriers to college success.
The oral history website and accompanying white paper document the experiences of those involved and highlight the unifying elements that define the CBO approach. It also frames the history of CBO/CUNY partnership initiatives as a continuum of efforts, informed by an interconnected network of organizations. The oral histories conducted with both leaders and peer mentors also provide a counternarrative to institution-focused, often paternalistic, community engagement literature. Instead, their stories present a trained and informed field of community organizations that have actively engaged institutions. While many individual partnership initiatives have been documented in reports, this website and white paper provide an overview of the field of community-based college success, its unified approach, and lessons learned through the discussion of significant moments in the CUNY/CBO partnership.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
