|
|
|
|
Graduate NYC’s College Completion Innovation Fund (CCIF) is investing nearly
$1.3 million in innovative initiatives and projects to improve college persistence and completion rates in New York City. For the second round, we are pleased to announce four new grantees: Bottom Line, The City College of New York, Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation, and the Young Women’s Leadership Network. These projects will serve low-income, first-generation college students, and have the potential to catalyze innovation and significantly improve college graduation rates for the young people they serve, while influencing the college success field more broadly.
Bottom Line was founded in 1997, and currently provides college retention supports to more than 1,200 New York City students. The CCIF grant to Bottom Line for $300,000 over three years will support the organization in adapting and innovating their current program model in order to support transfer students for the first time in the organization's history. This new initiative will serve low-income, first-generation college-goers who are graduating from CUNY community colleges with associate degrees and are entering one of several CUNY senior colleges. Through this program, the students will receive both summer transitional programming as well as comprehensive ongoing support during their time at their respective senior colleges. This project aims to increase bachelor's degree attainment significantly for the students served, and also has potential for broader impact on the field's understanding of how to serve transfer students more effectively.
The City College of New York is the oldest of the CUNY campuses, and the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership enrolls close to 20% of City College's undergraduate students. The CCIF grant to the Colin Powell School for $84,765 for one year will allow the school to replicate a project called Project Win-Win, to recover "lost degrees" by working to identify, re-engage, and support students who are fewer than 12 credits away from graduation, but have abandoned their studies. This project aims to assist specific students in the target group in returning to school and earning degrees quickly. Additionally, it will facilitate the identification of non-academic barriers to graduation, in order to improve internal processes that will benefit students, and ultimately improve completion rates.
Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation has been providing college access services to students in the community of Cypress Hills, Brooklyn since 2000, and have more recently expanded to college retention and completion programming as well. The CCIF grant for $99,000 over three years will enable Cypress Hills’ well-established peer mentor program to integrate targeted counseling to support their students in transferring from two-year to four-year colleges. This will be the first local program to leverage peer counseling to help students plan for and transition to senior colleges and it will help to inform the field’s growing understanding of best practices connected to peer coaching and increasing bachelor's degree attainment.
Young Women’s Leadership Network (YWLN), founded in 1998, runs a network of all-girls public schools in NYC, and in addition, offers a comprehensive college access and success program for young men and women called CollegeBound Initiative (CBI). The CCIF grant for $300,000 over three years will invest in a new project for CBI called The Closer. Through this project, the organization will seek to re-engage several hundred program alumni who have left college with the equivalent of six or more semesters’ worth of credits, and provide support to re-engage them in school and help them to complete their bachelor’s degrees. The CCIF believes that this investment will help inform and address underlying factors that hinder students who are nearing the finish line to college graduation.
The CCIF Advisory Board is thrilled to invest in these organizations and we look forward to working with them as well as sharing lessons learned and best practices with the broader college access and success community.
Thank you for your interest in Graduate NYC and the College Completion Innovation Fund. We look forward to seeing you at one of our upcoming events on college persistence and completion, and to learning with you as these projects and others from across the city are implemented, evaluated, and discussed. .
Best regards,
Lisa Castillo Richmond
Executive Director
Graduate NYC
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
