Updates:
11-January-2010: Happy New Year everyone! Another success story, this time from California:
"Ashley Williams moved 26 times and attended 23 different schools by the time she finished eighth grade.
It was not the ideal adolescence growing up in foster care, but Williams bucked the odds for someone like her to make it to college and also prosper as a UCLA sophomore with a 3.3 grade point average."
Great story of success from a student at UCLA. Find the rest of it here. I love finding these stories, so if anyone here's about a successful foster-youth out there, please let me know about it.
17-December-2009: 'The Price of a Sentence'- great article in Newsweek about some important developments to what can possibly happen when a foster youth 'ages out' of the system.
29-November-2009: Another great story out of Texas: After a succession of foster homes, young Kayla finds a great placement with a loving family. Full story here.
24-November-2009: Thanksgiving is coming up soon and I wanted to point out a great program run by the Orphan Foundation of America: the vMentor Program. From their website:
OFA's innovative vMentor Program is the only national online mentoring program for foster teens. It provides a convenient and highly effective online platform for private communication between young adults and trained volunteer mentors.
The system uses web portal technology to enable exchanges around the clock, as well as access to a host of resources helpful for young adults aging out of the foster care system.
The program serves current and former foster youth ages 16-23 who receive post-secondary funding from OFA or who are in an independent living program that partners with OFA. These youth are matched with compatible vMentors based on their expressed needs, including professional and extracurricular interests.
vMentors make a two-year commitment to email their mentees on a weekly basis. Mentoring is done online using the secure portal, and all communication is monitored by case workers to ensure participant safety.
15-November-2009: Here's a great story about a foster-youth who's not quite in college yet, but has been fighting hard to find a great foster-family to help him get on that path. Alex Chivescu has been an advocate for himself and more people should here his story. Link here.
02-November-2009: This time, the former foster-youth kicking butt at college can be found in Texas, courtesy of MyFox Houston. Raphael Baptiste is getting a free education at Texas Southern University after growing up in foster-care. More details here.
04-October-2009: Great story about a foster-youth attending college who received over $1 million in scholarship offers. Story from the Chicago Tribune here. Some follow up here. Wonderful, inspirational story.
05-September-2009: Yeah! For the second year in a row, two foster-youth attending UMass Amherst have received scholarships! This is awesome and due in large part to the donations we receive. Thanks for everyone's help and remember, if you are able to make a tax-deductible donation, please do so by going to our donation page. Thanks again.
25-August-2009: Ok - almost time for students to be starting classes up again. I'll post an update on the number of foster-youth attending UMass Amherst soon. For some perspective, keep in mind that ~24% of all adults in America have completed a degree of some type - for adults who were foster-youth at some time in their life that number drops to 3%. These scholarships and financial resources help the kids overcome one of the greater obstacles to finishing school.
22-May-2009: We'll be radio silent for a few months as our principal (Alex Ambroz) is getting married this summer and needs to prepare for the ceremony!
16-April-2009: My contact at UMass (Janet Muzzy, great lady) gave me some interesting statistics on the number of students attending UMass Amherst that were or are foster-youth. There are currently 10 students, all with high financial need. Their majors include Sociology, Chinese, Psychology and even a few students at the School of Management (let's hear it for ISOM! And yes, I'm an alum of the awesome Isenberg School of Management, great place). They come from all over the state (Framingham, Sunderland, Boston, Westfield) and only 1 has no need for financial aid. I recognize that times are tough in America today, but if you're able to donate at all to help these kids with their education, please click on the link to the left.
13-April-2009: Today was a great day. I had the chance to go up to UMass and meet with the first two scholarship recipients! They are two young ladies (both former foster-kids) who are doing their best to get through school and doing a great job at it. Here's a quote from one of them on the impact that the scholarship has had on her life:
"The Onwards and Upwards scholarship has helped give me the opportunity to pursue my education at UMass. I can relax knowing I do not have to worry about books and other expenses. I am grateful for this scholarship and I thank you."
-Susan L.
That's the goal folks - help these kids achieve their dreams of a college education.
01-February-2009: Good news to share. I spoke with my contact at UMass and they found two students who were former foster-youth. The scholarships for the '08-'09 year will be awarded to both of them this semester and it will follow them until they graduate. This is a great moment and really everything that we've been working towards for the past few years. The goals now are to increase the size of the scholarship at UMass-Amherst and to go nationwide with scholarships for foster-youth attending any college. As I've heard often from folks wiser than I, this is a marathon, not a sprint and we're just getting started.
Thank you to everyone who has helped to make this a success. In other good and related news, I act as a virtual mentor through the Orphan Foundation of America and they recently shared an excellent collection of scholarship information. It was first put together by U.S. Congresswoman Lucille Roybal-Allard and I've included a link to it here. It can also be found on the Scholarships page.
22-October-2008: Onward and Upwards is getting some press, nice! The Department of Sport Management at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass was nice enough to put up information about the scholarship on their website. Just glad to get the word out to a larger audience. Thanks guys!
19-June-2008: The scholarships are here! Starting in the Fall of 2008 there should be at least two scholarships for $625 each for foster-youth trying to make their way through college at UMass-Amherst. We would also like to announce that there will be a new scholarship opened up to any student nationwide for $500 (per semester). The application and details to follow.
07-April-2008: Alright, things are moving along! We got a chance to sit down with the Triangle Community Foundation here in Durham, NC and get some ideas on how to set up a scholarship for local foster-kids. Also, we're very close to having all of the paperwork done for the scholarship at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in Amherst, MA. The way things are coming together, we should have at least two $500 scholarships each semester for foster-kids getting an education at this wonderful school. Whoo hooo! Once the paperwork is all set, I'll update the website with the link to the folks where the scholarship info is found.
16-Sep-2007: Progress! We now have the entire list of scholarships available for download. You can choose Word, PDF, or Excel. We should have state specific data on the site by tonight. It's a work in progress.
11-Aug-2007: Ok, time to fix up the site a bit. I've downsized the fonts across the site so everything will be easier to read. We've received our first real donation too! Rock on. As well, we were able to secure a separate commitment of $1,000 towards our goal, which is just awesome. I'm still working on the downloadable file for the scholarships page - just going to take a bit of time.
12-July-2007: Added a few more scholarships. I've realized that with the breadth of scholarships out there I'll need to make the scholarships page a little bit easier to navigate. I'm hesitant to add some type of 'search' feature as I've always been a fan of having all of the data in once place. I do think that there should be some general 'major' categories, e.g., state-specific information (Texas, Maryland and Massachusetts don't charge tuition to foster-kids going to state schools, rock on!) as well as a file (in Excel and a PDF) that someone could just download. It's going to take me a little while to get all of that done and for the moment I'd like to focus on getting the site translated into Spanish. Wheh. Lots of stuff to do.
11-July-2007: Ok, we're now up to 7 different scholarships. The goal is to have at least 50 different ones listed before the end of the summer. Progress people!
05-July-2007: Thanks for the feedback people, I really appreciate it. I got a great idea today - this site needs to be translated into Spanish! So...do I have any volunteers?
04-July-2007: Ok, the website is finally up and running! Any feedback is appreciated.
13-May-2007: Alright, I've got the domain set up but I won't be able to finish the website until I get some more free time.
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't."
Anatole France