Students Find Purpose in College through College Corps – Financial Aid Matters, But So Does Community Engagement
A year after Gov. Gavin Newsom’s #CaliforniansForAll College Corps launched, providing $10,000 grants to some 6,500 low-income college students in return for community service work, the program has proven to be a transformative experience for both students and the organizations where they work. Finding purpose turns out to be a powerful motivator at a time when students report rising rates of depression and anxiety, as well as financial stress and uncertainty.
At a joint briefing held by Ethnic Media Services and California Black Media, March 13, speakers – Emilio Ruiz, College Corps Fellow, Liberal Studies Major and Fellow Ambassador for the CSULB College Corps Program; Dr. Allison Briscoe-Smith Ph.D., Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center and the co-instructor of the GGSC’s Bridging Differences online course; Dr. Beth Manke, Campus Program Lead, Professor of Human Development and Co-PI/ Program Director for the CSULB College Corps Program; Ishmael Pruitt, Community Host Partner, works directly with two College Corp Fellows, Co-founder and CEO of Project Optimism; and Josh Fryday, California Chief Service Officer, California Volunteers – talked about the how and why of the initiative.
Emilio Ruiz, 24, a College Corps Fellow, share his personal story and unique experiences as it relates to education and the College Corps program.
“As a child, along with my six siblings, I went through many adverse childhood experiences whether it was dealing with divorced parents at a young age or trying to navigate the invisible difficulty of constantly moving to places all over Southern California, or the tangible financial distress, or the domestic violence and abuse I’ve witnessed and endured.
“I hold a unique perspective on how schools and educators can have an important impact on children especially those who deal with any one of these challenging circumstances.
“The positive reassurance and guidance from my past teachers and mentors have truly helped me to choose teaching as a career thanks to the College Corps.
“Being in my teaching program and learning about trusted, as well as new methods of how to create exciting and engaging lessons for students, I feel lucky that I get to see directly how ground education uses hands-on approaches to teach students about environmental activism, justice, and science, all within their school.
“I’ve gone from being a student who once desperately needed a safe space to learn to being the trusted adult who can provide students with a natural learning environment where they each have a deep sense of belonging and know that they are seen, heard, supported, and valued,” said Ruiz.
Ishmael Pruitt, co-founder and CEO of Project Optimism said, “I was serving as a youth mentor to, at the time, the lowest performing High School in the County of Sacramento, Hiram Johnson High School.
“I created a student organization called it Project Optimism. Students in the group had that same transformative experience and through this. Our grades were increasing our focus and engagement was increasing, and we just continue to grow from there beyond.
“I decided to get my Master’s at CSU Long Beach and student development and higher education where I wanted to be very intentional with the development of college students based off my experience.
“My peers who did not get to graduate from CSU Sacramento, I wanted to make sure I was very intentional in coaching them and developing them. I’m very grateful for this opportunity to have College Corps and to be a part of the experience.
“In 2020, I was able to leave my role as an academic counselor at CSU Long Beach to pursue full-time status running this organization.
“We serve youth from Sacramento County all the way to Los Angeles County, about 340 students a year for the full year with various mentorship cohorts where we align college students with at promise youth within the city with an intentional guiding curriculum that supports the whole student.
“We believe in support supporting the individual first and then the students,” said Pruitt.
Dr. Beth Manke, Program Director for the CSULB College Corps Program said about College Corps program at Cal State Long Beach, “We’re super proud to be one of the 46 universities and colleges offering College Corps programs. This academic year we have 50 undergraduate students including those who are undocumented, completing 450 hours of work at one of 27 local non-profit organizations addressing climate change, environmental justice, food insecurity and K-12.
“One of the important things about how we do College Corps on our campus is that we envision the service that students are completing as internships.
“These are experiences have proven to be quite transformative for our students. In fact, as part of our mid-year survey, where we got all our students together and asked them how their internship or college core placements were going, we found that over 85 percent of our student fellows reported that their internships have helped them.
“They’re able to apply course knowledge to real world experiences. They’re acquiring work-related skills, developing skills to work effectively as part of a team.
“What makes our College Corps program so successful? – It’s an equity anchored asset-based approach. We honor and draw on students’ cultural backgrounds and work with students holistically by acknowledging how their life experiences, their skills, their talents, and even their dreams, how do those shape their academic success and well-being.
“What’s the magic sauce? – We really are intentional about creating safe spaces for our students where they can talk about personal and professional challenges.
“All of our students take an internship course as part of their involvement in College Corps and have instructors who help them develop learning goals; how to problem solve challenges that are coming up; and they also can reflect on their experiences and interact with their peers.
“We’re intentional about curating placements for a student. It’s not simply placing students out with different host sites. We work with them to identify their interests and where they want to be placed, and working with our community host sites about their needs, and they’re really doing a matching process that involves interviewing in a review of feedback.
“We are explicit about training our host site supervisors. We sometimes have site supervisors who’ve never mentored a student before. They’ve never worked or supervised a student intern and so we provide training for our sites to help them mentor our students, including we offer our site supervisor certification in Mental Health First Aid because we know it’s so important that our sites can recognize the symptoms of the stress of anxiety.
“Many students today don’t feel they belong or matter on their college campuses and we know that this can lead to mental health issues. Some studies suggest that maybe even upwards of 60 percent of college students are reporting symptoms of anxiety and depression and so our student fellows know that when they are experiencing that anxiety or that stress, they can turn to the many adult role models affiliated with our program for guidance and referrals.
“We’re proud that our students and College Corps report being seen, feel a sense of belonging, and have been able to find their purpose,” said Dr. Manke.
Dr. Allison Briscoe-Smith, Ph.D., next provided her perspective on the unique challenges of students who are on campus today, coming out of the pandemic, and looking forward at a very challenging time.
“As a child clinical psychologist, I also got my start by being placed in a volunteer space and focus on literacy and a head start. The financial support that came with that was transformative for me and it also provided a focus for my kind of career.
“As a partner with College Corps from UC Berkeley, we’re creating a curriculum to support bridging how we connect across our differences.
“I want to zoom out because I sit in perspectives of working within higher education, and as a clinical psychologist have been working with counseling agencies on state campuses, we’ve just gotten a recent kind of national data about how college students are doing.
“The two leading problems that we see are anxiety and depression. There was an escalation of mental health challenges for students on campus prior to the pandemic, and then pandemic hit, and of course our data kind of fell apart but what we’re finding is we have quickly rebounded right back up to pre-pandemic levels and are anticipating beating those levels in terms of worsening mental health on campus.
“This is a huge challenge and big concern many clinicians. We are hearing from students the challenges include hopelessness, purposelessness, and isolation. Those are three factors really contributing to a sense of not feeling like they belong, not knowing where they can get help, so something like this program and the stories that Ishmael and Emilio have offered, we are hopeful is an antidote that finding purpose through service.
“We also are faced with big challenges in the context of the waves of pandemics that we’ve been experiencing. Whether those are the pandemics of COVID experiences of racialized violence, of climate, we’re very distressed and we also have these wonderful opportunities for hope and connection through service.
“This is a great opportunity that might be able to help ensure that we don’t see continued escalation of mental health challenges for our students,” said Dr. Briscoe-Smith.
Giving an example of systemic failure, Dr. Briscoe-Smith said, “I’m an early childhood specialist. Our early childhood and childcare systems were decimated by the pandemic.
“Majority of folks who provide care for kids in the state of California are black and brown. They were under resourced and shut down and that provided many challenges to working families.
“Many folks who are on college campuses are working families or parents, so when we have an infrastructure that collapses around taking care of our kids, it serves as a barrier for students to get to campus, to get to work, so there’s one example of the ways in which our system kind of collapsed during that,” Dr. Briscoe-Smith.
“As we’ve returned from the pandemic, we all had these hopes and perhaps unrealistic expectations, that we were returning to sort of pre-COVID norms. The reality is that ‘norm’ no longer exists and we’ve in some cases perhaps failed to create systems to support our students that upon that return to our campus.
“Students who did their last couple of years primarily online in high school, or their first couple of years at our institutions or online and now they’re back in person, which we’re excited about, and I think for the most part, they are excited about, but it comes with challenges.
“We’re now back to them having to commute; having to address some uncertain financial or economic circumstances for their families; many of our students experience a financial loss during the pandemic either their own, or their parents, or others.
“Many of our students contribute to the financial security of their families and in that regard it’s taken us a bit to recognize we have some new challenges and those challenges come with the stress and anxiety that our students are experiencing,” said Dr. Manke.
Josh Friday, who is overseeing this program as a critical uh influencer at the top levels of the state government, works closely with the governor’s office, spoke about the first nine months, the lessons learned, and his view of the program going forward, and the challenges for the second year.
“The governor in the state of California understand that we are facing multiple crises at once. We’re facing a student debt crisis; we’re facing crises of enormous existential issues; a climate crisis; a food insecurity crisis; education disparity crises; and we’re also at the same time facing a crisis of the spirit.
“The so-called great resignation where people re-thought what it means to work and live a life of dignity. We all understand the impact of social media on anxiety; the polarization and the divisiveness that we see in our society; and we understand that everyone is looking for meaning and purpose, and belonging and community, and what gives us hope in the state of California is that College Corps.
“This one program helps us address all these multiple crises at once. The program works where students like Emilio, who commit to a year of service, can earn up to $10,000 to make sure that they don’t have to take out loans, or work other jobs, that they can do work in the community where they can follow their passion, rather than just a paycheck.
“The truth is these young people are doing meaningful work for all our communities. They’re doing work around climate change; they’re doing critical work around food insecurity, helping get food to those who need it the most; and dealing with the education disparities that we’re seeing especially among our low-income youth coming out of COVID.
“It’s so much more than just creating a belief. It’s about action. It’s about a plan. It’s about having a real path for change, that’s what people are looking for, and President Obama once said, and I think it’s relevant for today’s conversation.
“President Obama said that hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it.
“When I see these students around the state, they are working for it, they’ve signed up to and step up to fight for it, and they’ve shown us the courage to create the change in the society that we need, and because of that College Corps is a win-win-win.
“It’s a win for the students who we help. We pay for school so they don’t have to take out loans or otherwise work. It’s a win for our communities who are receiving all of the benefits of this meaningful work, and it’s a help for society where we now will have a new generation of Californians who understand how to work together, for people from very different backgrounds and perspectives to help solve problems in our community.
“Another inspiring student, Natalie, from a community college in LA said that because of College Corps, for the first time in her life, she feels because of the work that she gets to do, she feels connected to her community.
“It reminds me of something that Dalai Lama often talks about, which is that joy and happiness. The things that can give us more hope and the things that can take us out of depression and give us relief from anxiety, joy and happiness is about being, at the end of the day, connected to other people and it’s about helping other people.
“College Corps students, thousands of them across the state are being connected to their community, and they’re being connected to each other, and so we are seeing the impact in the first nine months.
“The first nine months gives us hope. We know that it’s going to bring hope to our entire state for years to come.
“We are incredibly proud that College Corps represents the state of California, nearly 80 percent of our students are self-identified students of color. 70 percent of our students are Pell Grant recipients. This program is for everyone and we’re so proud that for the first time in this this impacts our Asian communities, this impacts our Latino communities, and impacts all our communities.
“For the first time, we have a state service program like this that includes AB540 eligible Dreamers, so we have over 500 Dreamers throughout the state of California who are now receiving support to go to college and have an opportunity like this because of this program. That’s a population that because normal programs like this are funded federally, have historically been excluded.
“Because of College Corps, we are able to include those populations here in California and it’s something we’re very proud,” said Fryday.
