Last updated on August 24, 2019

The Jandon Center for Community Engagement has received federal grant funding to support the College to collaborate with community members, local organizations and schools in Springfield, Mass. on helping young adults transition to life after high school, including college or employment. Young people in Springfield will lead a research team to explore how to mobilize community assets to support the long-term success of their peers seeking to bridge the economic, educational and social obstacles facing Springfield residents.

The new project stems from Project Coach (PC), a cross-age mentorship program initiated in 2003 by Professor Sam Intrator, Professor Elizabeth A. Woodson 1922 and Professor Emeritus Don Siegel. Project Coach boosts high school graduation rates for students and provides opportunities for young adults to serve as community leaders and mentors to younger children.

Since 2003, Smith has worked collaboratively with Springfield Public Schools (SPS), Baystate Health, individual public schools, community partners (such as New North Citizens’ Council) and institutional partners to address issues related to inequities in graduation rates and opportunities for educational advancement, recreation and wellness enrichment. Project Coach currently includes over 40 current high school students, their families and hundreds of alums. The high school students are mentored by Smith students.

Dana Vera ’19, a mathematics major at Smith, said, “I have been an academic coach for three years now, and my role has been extremely fulfilling. I enjoy seeing students’ progress and helping them become life-long mentors to others. High school graduates are still coming back to volunteer at Project Coach. The Participatory Action Grant will help secure and expand the resources offered to these enthusiastic students.”

The Participatory Action Grant originates from Project Coach’s mission of helping young adults succeed in school and in life. Through the grant research, the College and Springfield community will explore how to do more than just help young adults blossom in high school. The end goal is to ensure student success even after high school. The focus for the grant project is to facilitate inclusive participatory action research to explore how to support young adults as they negotiate life after high school, including enrolling in college, securing employment, continuing to provide community leadership and building supportive networks.

Project Coach alum and Assistant Program Director, Yesenia Valentin, remarked, “Project Coach impacted me more than I expected. The program gave me a role model in life, and it also shaped me into a leader. Right now, I am most excited about getting into the community and interacting with individuals who are in different places in their lives. Through the grant initiative, we can create a pathway that supports the students’ long-term pursuits, which will allow them to have a more stable future.”

Erin DeCou, who co-directs the Urban Education Initiative and PC with Jo Glading-DiLorenzo, Valentin and the other PC alums expressed the same enthusiasm, saying, “We already know that the people we work with in Project Coach have tremendous leadership capacities. We’ve seen that on the sports field and in classrooms where they teach elementary students. I’m excited to work alongside the young adults who have graduated from Project Coach to dig into a complex community challenge that impacts them in a very real way. The grant project will help these young leaders explore how to engage their neighbors in solving a community problem. This project starts with a focus on education and career readiness, but there’s no reason it has to stop here. My hope is that these young adults will continue to engage with their neighbors and build community solutions to whatever they identify as something that needs to be addressed.”

Professor Sam Intrator and Denys Candy, Director at the Jandon Center for Community Engagement, are co-principal investigators for the project; it will start out as a one year project, with the potential to renew for a second year. In the first year, activities will focus on engaging the local community, activating the research team, framing research questions with community members and leading focus groups, interviews and community-wide conversations. In the second year, activities will focus on crafting and testing actions and solutions.

The research design involves convening high school students and young adult graduates of Project Coach to play a significant role in the research process. The students will develop the research questions and utilize a range of methods to study problems that impede young adults’ academic progress and personal enrichment. The project will provide the impetus for young people, community members and researchers from Smith to come together to address a complex and urgent national and local challenge — the impact of educational inequality on communities.

Want to be a part of this story?
Please contact Erin Decou, edecou@smith.edu, for more information on how to get involved.