CBO’s do what they do best: meet the kids where they are, use youth development principles and help shepherd them along. There’s no silver bullet. There’s no secret. That’s what they do.
-Laurie Dien, The Pinkerton Foundation.
Rooted in positive youth development, the collective approach of community-based college success programs grows out of a community of practitioners who have collaborated, developed best practices, and met regularly for over twenty years. Within the 88 organizations identified by CUNYs Network for College Success, there is a great deal of variation in the services provided and overall development. These range from alumni texting strategies to robust college success advising programs that provide six or more years of support to their participants. The latter are the culture carriers who have historically led the field of college success and have contributed their oral histories to this project. Below are key elements of the CBO approach and the role that each plays in supporting students in CUNY Colleges.
Moving from College Access to College Success
“In 99′, we opened our first college access program based on the Goddard Riverside Options model and ran an a storefront access program for a long time, probably 8 years. In those first couple of years, it became really obvious to us that college access is really important and critical work, but it couldn’t stop when young people graduated high school. They didn’t just stop needing support or needing CBO to rely on.”
– Emily Van Ingen, Cypress Hills LDC
“Funders started to say, hey, you’ve been doing this work for quite some time. We get that you’re getting students in the college. So what’s happening to them once they’re there?
“When we started to look, do the research and dig deeper, the news and the data was not good. That’s when people started to say all right, we need to start seeing students not only to college but through college”
-Allison Palmer, New Settlement Apartments
“Alot of the high schools that we partner with had very nurturing communities and deep relationships and ways to refer students to supports and services. We didn’t want that to drop once we handed them off to the colleges.’
– LW, College Success Professional
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Grounded in Relationships
“The CBOs, on an individual level, know students well enough to know their potential. Sometimes students don’t even know what their career trajectory will look like and we like to allow for exploration. The CBOs from Access to Success have worked with the student over time, and they’ve seen their growth and development and can see what types of opportunities may be best fit for their continued development.“
– LW, College Success Professional
“Students see the institution as being intimidating, whereas when they’re working with the CBO and because we’ve had a relationship with them sometimes even prior to starting the college process. That relationship is there, so it allows us to just reach and impact the students in ways that the schools can’t. But when you put it together, it becomes very powerful.”
Theory Thompson, Good Shepherd Services
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“Having people like a CBO in your neighborhood is helpful to a college student because college is one part of your complex, multidimensional life and there are other things that can come up that you need support around that your college isn’t going to help you with. Issues in your neighborhood, housing, work, crime and safety, food insecurity, whatever it may be. That’s the power of the CBO, as that foundation that you stand on that is more encompassing than just an educational institution.”
– Emily Van Ingen, Cypress Hills LDC
Responding and Adapting
I think the nimbleness and the flexibility of CBO’s, the bureaucracy of CUNY is not going to be able to replicate it. COVID is a perfect example. It’s unfortunate that something like COVID would need to amplify that, but I actually think CBOs really demonstrated, in that moment, our value at a large scale. CUNY, you can’t figure out how to get people tech. We’re going to try and fill that gap and get people tech. People need emergency funding right away. We’re going to try and figure out how we can distribute emergency funding right away, in partnership with philanthropy,
-Allison Palmer, New Settlement Apartments
I always say we’re more flexible than CUNY. And what I mean by that is we have the ability to adapt, and change programming to respond to the students need without there being so much red tape.
-Theory Thompson, Good Shepherd Services
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Ecosystem of Support
I always have said it’s like a huge army of advisors doing the work in the field that CUNY’s not employing, But if we were to employ them with the right information and training and resources, then we would have so much more wrap-around support to students.
– Rebecca Beeman
It’s been over a decade, but all these different programs and initiatives have been going on and sometimes colliding, bouncing off one another. It’s a fascinating ecosystem. For example, if one of them hadn’t happened, what would have happened to the others?
– Laurie Dien, The Pinkerton
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