Date/Time
Date(s) - 05/16/2017
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm
Location
UMass Boston
Boston HERC Gala Registration Link
Your support of Boston Higher Education Resource Center’s (HERC) 2017 Gala helps to:
Expand our ground-breaking Passport Program to additional public high schools, as it has proven successful in helping 80% of our high school graduates of color to enroll in college and graduate within five years; Sustain the difference Passport makes in the lives of 1,200+ students in 9 non-exam Boston Public Schools, by teaching them how to focus on academic achievement, adopt new mental disciplines, make sound health choices, and to learn the life-skills, critical and creative thinking needed to realize their dreams; Increase support through college to reverse current drop-out trends by linking Passport graduates to needed resources, internship jobs and by pairing our college students with corporate and nonprofit Success Coaches.
WHAT PASSPORT DOES . . . Passport targets students of color (primarily Black and Latino) who are first-generation, low-income, with between a 2.0 and 3.0 GPA, and attending failing or under-resourced non-exam BPS high schools. Passport Coaches (who are all Black or Latina, and are all first-generation themselves) spend an average of 15 to 20 hours per week, throughout the school year, providing their Passport Scholars no less than 1.5 hours to 2 hours of weekly classroom instruction, imbuing these youth with what we call the Habits of the Mind: 21st Century skills that are indispensable for their success in college and in the innovation-driven Boston workplace they will soon be inhabiting.
PASSPORT WORKS . . . Currently fewer than 30% of Latino (29.7%) and black students (28.9%) graduating from BPS are completing college [Boston Foundation, 2016]. In stark contrast to BPS’s college completion trends, 87% of the first-generation students who go on to college from Passport since the inception of Passport’s Community-Based program in 2004 have graduated within 5-years of enrollment.
WHAT IS AHEAD FOR PASSPORT . . . Your help will sustain a trajectory of growth bringing Passport to the classrooms of 1,800 first-generation youth, from 9th to 12th grades, in 15 non-exam Boston public high schools by the Fall of 2021. Your support also enables Passport to introduce a corps of post-secondary transitional Coaches (including corporate mentors from entities such as State Street, Liberty Mutual, and other entities), deepening our capacity to serve these students beyond their graduation from high school into college and on to sustainable, 21st Century careers.
