CARA Wins Two-Year Grant for Pilot Program Promoting College Success

A two-year grant of $165,000 per year from the Pinkerton Foundation will support the pilot program Youth Leadership for College Success, an initiative of the College Access: Research and Action (CARA). CARA is hosted by the Graduate Center's Center for Human Environments and the Public Science Project, and its codirectors, Lori Chajet and Janice Bloom, are alumni of the GC's Ph.D. Program in Urban Education. Chajet will direct the pilot program.

Launching at four CUNY campuses-BMCC, Bronx Community College, Hostos, and NYC College of Technology-the program is an extension of CARA's successful Youth Leadership for College Access and College Bridge programming, which use peer-to-peer and near-to-peer models to support first-generation-to-college students in the college access and matriculation processes. A newly appointed campus coordinator at each college will supervise ten Student Success Leaders, who will each have a caseload of twenty students, for a total of eight hundred students served.

The collaborative project, developed in partnership with Graduate NYC!, aims to increase college persistence and retention rates; to build and to diversify the colleges' capacity to integrate, engage, support and retain students successfully through graduation; and to identify and document promising practices for college retention on commuter campuses.