Boston, MA (October 1, 2012) – With an eye on meeting the academic and career-focused needs of 21st-century students who juggle jobs, families, and college, The Kresge Foundation has awarded a three-year, $750,000 grant to Jobs for the Future (JFF) to develop a network of statewide Student Success Centers. The purpose of the centers is to organize community colleges within states—including their leaders, faculty, and staff—around common action to accelerate their efforts to improve persistence and completion.
This grant builds on the existing investments The Kresge Foundation has made in state community college associations in Arkansas, Michigan, and Ohio to create statewide Student Success Centers. JFF will provide technical assistance, network development, and documentation efforts in these states and will help create Student Success Centers in additional states.
“This project is aligned squarely with our strategy of propelling more students who are underprepared for and underrepresented in higher education to postsecondary success,” said Caroline Altman Smith, senior program officer at The Kresge Foundation. “We look forward to working with JFF to expand these support centers and build additional capacity in states to connect the dots between various student success initiatives.”
Over the three-year grant period, JFF will seek to:
- Maximize the reach and impact of student success initiatives across each state;
- Build state-level capacity for data-informed decision making;
- Enhance and expand existing completion efforts by facilitating a cross-state network of state implementation teams; and
- Promote Student Success Centers nationally by documenting successful models and developing implementation tools.
“Community colleges cannot reach their potential of helping low-skilled Americans achieve their education and employment goals without doing a far better job of meeting their academic and career-focused needs,” said Michael Collins, associate vice president at JFF. “This work will help strengthen an important new model for statewide support for community college student success that should be of interest to reformers in all states.”
About The Kresge Foundation
Based in metropolitan Detroit, The Kresge Foundation is a $3.1 billion private foundation that seeks to influence the quality of life for future generations through its support of nonprofit organizations working in its seven program areas: Arts and Culture, Community Development, Detroit, Education, the Environment, Health, and Human Services. Fostering greater access to and success in postsecondary education for low-income, minority and first-generation college students is the focus of Kresge’s Education grantmaking. In 2011, Kresge awarded more than $22 million in grants to support higher education in the United States and South Africa, with half benefiting U.S. community colleges.
www.kresge.org
www.twitter.com/kresgedu
About Jobs for the Future
Jobs for the Future works with our partners to design and drive adoption of education and career pathways leading from college readiness to career advancement for those struggling to succeed in today’s economy.
www.jff.org
Twitter: @JFFtweets
