The suicide rate among veterans standing at an alarming 22 deaths each day. As if that’s not enough, military families also face the challenges of high unemployment, debt and PTSD.
So the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work decided to create a Master’s program that would train graduate students to address the needs of veterans, service members and military families.
Social workers are often on the front lines when service members return home — diagnosing their problems and helping vets find housing, jobs and stability. Part of the USC program’s emphasis is in training students how to deliver effective therapy that doesn’t drive military members and their spouses away, a problem with some counseling that results in veterans failing to get the help they need. But in the USC program, a concept called the Motivational Interviewing Learning Environment and Simulation (MILES) teaches students how to effectively manage that vital first contact with both service members and veterans.
Many of the students that have enrolled in USC’s program since its inception in 2009 have direct experience with the military themselves — either as soldiers themselves or spouses of deployed military.
Pamela and Mark Mischel recently helped endow a new scholarship program, the Yellow Ribbon Scholarship Fund, which will pay the tuition for military members and vets who want to enroll. “These young men and women have given so much, and we want to do our small part to be able to help,” Mark Mischel tells USC News.
Pamela says that when they learned that many veterans and their spouses were interested in enrolling USC’s military social work program, they decided to help. “If these people wanted to become social workers, then we wanted to help them do that,” she says. “This is our small way of giving back to them for the services they’ve done for our country.”
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Tag: scholarships
How Does a Professional Skier Inspire Kids Toward Academic Achievement?
If you live in Colorado, you know to expect the release of a movie highlighting the daring exploits of professional skiers in far-flung, snowy mountains from Warren Miller Entertainment each year.
Chris Anthony has been a featured athlete in the films for 25 years, but one of his lesser-known achievements is the inspiration he’s been bringing to young people for 15 years through his Chris Anthony Youth Initiative Project.
The 48-year-old Anthony visits schools across the country and shows clips from the films as a way to teach kids life lessons that he hopes will spur them to achieve academically and athletically. He tells Jason Blevins of the Denver Post, “I want to reach as many kids as possible. I want to let kids know there are many paths to success and they can use whatever talents they have to reach their goals. The idea is to inspire and motivate kids to go out and find their niche.”
Anthony’s presentations emphasize different ways of thinking about academic subjects that might reach kids who don’t connect with traditional methods. For example, he often shows a video of Olympic gold medalist Mikaela Shriffin slaloming to teach lessons in physics and geometry. And he teaches history through the film “Climb To Glory,” about the 10th Mountain Division Ski Troopers in World War II.
He also focuses on teaching outdoor safety to kids in mountain schools. “We should be educating our kids in the mountains about both the opportunities and dangers in the backcountry. We have an opportunity here to create more awareness,” he tells the Denver Post.
Anthony recently started a foundation which raises money to fund even more school visits, as well as a scholarship program. Several other professional skiers have joined his mission, realizing that they have skills to showcase off the mountain too. “This becomes a channel for them to give back,” Anthony says.
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The Epic Take Down of Miss America That Has Led to a Very Unexpected Windfall
John Oliver has helped secure scholarship money for some future female engineers — and these women didn’t have to parade around in a bikini to get it.
During a recent episode of “Last Week Tonight,” the funnyman delivered a scathing commentary on the annual Miss America beauty pageant (covering topics such as the objectifying nature of swimsuit competitions to the absurdity of answering complex questions domestic violence or foreign policy in 20 seconds).
However, Oliver exposed something about the organization that’s more eyebrow raising than butt glue (yes, that’s a real product). According to the show’s research, it appears that the pagent’s claim to be “the world’s largest provider of scholarships for women” is incredibly exaggerated — the organization says it gives $45 million a year, but it appears to be more like $4 million. Not only that, the only women who are eligible for scholarships are pageant contestants between the ages of 17 to 24 who’ve never been married or had a baby. (The Miss America pagent has since responded to Oliver’s report in a blog post.)
At the same time, Oliver listed off other female-only organizations that he felt could use a little more funding, including the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), the Patsy Mink Educational Foundation and the Jeannette Rankin Women’s Scholarship Fund.
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After the episode aired, donors decided to open up their wallets for these organizations. According to the Chicago Tribune, SWE received $25,000 in just two days (about 15 percent of its expected annual donations) as well as wild jump in web traffic.
“This has been huge for us,” Peter Finn, deputy executive director of SWE, tells the publication. “It’s tremendous.”
Additionally, the Jeannette Rankin Foundation tweeted, “Came to work this morning to find many more gifts; $2,800 in total donations since @LastWeekTonight mention! You are all so great!” NationSwell reached out to the Patsy Mink Foundation to see if they’ve received a similar windfall, which is now referred to as “the John Oliver bounce,” but has not received a response.
If you’d like to find out more or donate to any of the organizations, click on the following links:
Patsy Mink Foundation
Jeannette Rankin Foundation
Society of Women Engineers
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A Formerly Homeless Student’s Remarkable Education Journey
When Ivon Padilla-Rodriguez was a junior at Canyon Springs High School in Nevada, there were times when she didn’t know where she was going to sleep at night.
“For three months, we had to look for somewhere to eat; we had to look for somewhere to sleep,” Ivon told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “My mom would go to Catholic Charities for food.” She also described sleeping on couches and cars of friends and strangers alike.
As the newspaper reports, despite not having a roof over her head, she excelled in school and became the top student in her class, graduating as valedictorian in 2011.
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The now 20-year-old is a double major in history and philosophy at the University of Nevada. And that’s not all she’s achieved in so little time—she’s also just won the highly competitive and prestigious Harry S. Truman Scholarship that’s worth $30,000.
She’s one of 60 students in the country who received this federal scholarship this year. Former notable winners include Janet Napolitano, George Stephanopoulos and Bill de Blasio. The money will go towards an education in law, social work, education, international affairs or public administration, health or policy, the Associated Press writes.
“Ivon’s story of accomplishment and community service is all the more inspiring because of her background,” UNR spokeswoman Jane Tors told the Review-Journal.
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To add icing on the cake, Ivon was also named one of Glamour‘s Top 10 College Women of 2014. Passionate about immigration reform, she told the women’s magazine she hopes to be a Latino-rights lawyer, and eventually a Supreme Court justice like her idol Sonia Sotomayor.
Looks like Ivon’s much-deserved scholarship is just more to add to her ever-increasing education fund. Back in 2011, she also won $100,000 in tuition money from Dr. Pepper after throwing 13 passes into a large Dr. Pepper can.
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How an Innovative Scholarship Encourages Low-Income Families to Save
When bills for food, housing, and transportation consume most, if not all, of a low-income family’s money, saving for college can seem impossible. But some think that society is so convinced of poor peoples’ inability to save that they aren’t giving them a fair shot by encouraging them to do so. And that a good saving habit, once established, will help these people in college and beyond.
A new program in Arizona, AZ Earn to Learn, provides low-income families with college scholarships while rewarding them for doing their own saving for school. The program, which currently exists in all three of Arizona’s state universities, provides low-income students with a $4,000 scholarship each year. In return, the students and their families must attend financial literacy workshops and save $500 of their own money toward college each year.
So far 1,500 scholarships at Arizona State, the University of Arizona, and Northern Arizona University have been funded through a $3.47 million grant from the Assets for Independence Program which the universities are matching with their own funding.
Katrina Verduzco, who is a freshman at the University of Arizona and the first in her family to attend college, told Michael Stratford of Inside Higher Ed, “I had never saved a dollar in my life,” but “If someone says they’re going to give you $4,000, you do it.” She put together the required annual $500 by working three part-time jobs. By combining this grant with Pell Grants, she’s able to attend college loan-free, saving herself from massive future debt.
Because of this important encouragement through AZ Earn to Learn, Verduzco sounds like she’s well on her way to breaking the cycle of poverty for good.
Soccer, Not Just a Pastime — but a Path to Citizenship
A year after arriving in New York City from Italy in 2009, the soft-spoken Reindorf Kyei, 18, was still struggling. He struggled with schoolwork, and he struggled at home. His mother was unemployed and his father was never home, working out of state to support the entire family and to maintain their legal residency status.
When Kyei was 7, his family had moved from their native Ghana to Italy in pursuit of economic opportunity, and then resettled again when his father landed a job in the United States. Torn between the three cultures, and speaking only broken English, Kyei and his family labored to fit into their new home.
Then, in March 2010, on a soccer field in the South Bronx, everything changed for Kyei. At the urging of his mother, he had sought out the youth coach of South Bronx United, a nonprofit soccer club based in one of New York’s poorest neighborhoods. Kyei started playing competitively with the club, and his teammates nicknamed him “Balo” — after Ghanian-Italian striker Mario Balotelli — a sentiment that carried special weight. Playing with South Bronx United not only provided an outlet for Kyei’s passion for the sport, but it also became the key to his dream: legal residency in the U.S.
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South Bronx United uses soccer as a way to engage with underprivileged kids, while providing them with tutoring, college prep and mentorship. Unlike other youth-mentoring programs that sometimes have a hard time keeping kids from dropping out, South Bronx United has a built-in draw. “They are always going to stay for the soccer,” says Andrew So, executive director of the club, which boasts a 99 percent retention rate.
The club has about 600 participants, who play on seven competitive teams and a recreational league. Staying true to the diversity of its South Bronx environment, the club is mostly made up of kids from immigrant families, and more than half were born outside the U.S. “That’s exactly the reason this program is so powerful. We have the added benefit here in the South Bronx because so many of our kids come from that [sports] culture and have that huge passion for soccer,” says So, a former high school teacher.
After joining the club in 2010, Kyei learned that his father had decided not to stay in the U.S. If he left, his children would be obligated to leave as well. However, Kyei, a sturdy central defender whose grades were improving through participation in the club’s tutoring and summer-school programs, had his heart set on something higher — a college scholarship. But that would require proper paperwork.
Through South Bronx United, pro bono attorneys helped him declare special immigrant juvenile status, which allows children to obtain green cards without mandatory parental approval. “At the beginning they tried to work with my dad, but he kept switching his mind about whether he wanted to stay [in America],” Kyei says. “Eventually, I just had to prove in a court that one of my parents, my dad, had abandoned me.”
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By the time his senior year came around, Kyei had a green card. He was also on the radar of a number of local colleges. During a game organized by South Bronx United, he caught the eye of Bloomfield College, a Division II college in New Jersey. After the school reviewed Kyei’s grades, which had drastically improved over the previous two years, it offered him a scholarship.
“We have a lot of immigrant youth who bring enormous challenges [around] language skills and things like that,” So says. “So we have kids who are very talented, but have not done well enough on SATs to qualify for a scholarship yet. That’s another reason educational components are so important for us.”
A higher degree helps down the line as well. Immigrant athletes who are in the U.S. on a visa need to be employable to keep it. A college degree helps with that. Meanwhile, players without the proper documents — many of whom may study in college through programs like Golden Door Scholars — may one day be eligible for amnesty, particularly if Congress passes new legislation similar to the DREAM Act (a bill that proposed giving legal status to illegal immigrants but was defeated in the Senate in 2010), which would grant residency to undocumented immigrants with a higher education.
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Kyei wouldn’t be headed to college without South Bronx United, he says. He is almost certain that he would be back in Italy or Ghana by now were it not for the club’s help. The same is true for other students in the club, such as Innocent, 21, and his 15-year-old brother, Paul, who came to the U.S. from Nigeria in 2008. (The club asked for the boys’ surname to be withheld in order to safeguard their efforts to gain residency.) They are working with the club in hopes of finally getting their green cards.
“We didn’t ever have Mommy and Daddy around,” says Innocent, whose parents returned to Nigeria in 2008, leaving him and his brother in the care of an uncle in New York. “[South Bronx United is] the reason I’m where I am, and there was no way we were ever going to get our cards without them.”
Innocent is now a student at Borough of Manhattan Community College. Paul is a winger for the club’s competitive travel team, and also aspires to receive a college scholarship one day.
“I don’t know where he would be without this,” Innocent says of his brother. “Nowhere, really. And the one thing he truly loves to do is play soccer.”
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The Next Frontier in Crowdfunding: DIY College Scholarships
Fed up with the lack of scholarship opportunities at your school? Well, now even scholarships can be DIY thanks to Cabell Maddux, a recent Wesleyan University graduate.
Maddux and his friends started a crowdfunding system called Scholarships Expanding Education to help students pay for college. SEE flips the traditional scholarship crowdfunding model around by inviting donors to start a scholarship in their own name. Then donors can recruit other people to donate to the fund. The donor can set GPA limits and majors so that the scholarship can be catered to what he or she would like to see. “We noticed the buzz around crowdfunding for students with a couple of sites that started up years ago, and these were sites where students were creating their own profile. As students ourselves, we thought it would be so hard for us to sell our stories to 100 strangers,” Maddux told Fast Company. “So we came up with this concept of flipping this on its head, with starting with someone who’s essentially the giver, so the student isn’t having to mobilize this crowd of donors.”
SEE debuted last month with encouraging results. A fund set up for Maddux’s grandfather’s birthday has raised $550 in the last week. And SEE has raised $8,000 in scholarships for Harvard, Fordham, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Averett University. Maddux and his team have applied for nonprofit status hoping to make scholarship donations tax deductible. The team aims to get things running smoothly before Maddux goes to medical school next year. “We want to build and provide another access point to financial aid,” Maddux told Fast Company. “We want to make this simple for the schools as well.”
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Here’s a Scholarship That Does More Than Send Kids to College
The state of Maine realizes that one size doesn’t fit all in the realm of higher education and career preparation. So it’s using the Competitive Skills Scholarship Program to offer low-income students multiple options to gain an education and a job in a high-growth field. The program awards funding for four-year degrees, certificate training, or apprenticeship programs to students who demonstrate that there are jobs in their chosen field within commuting distance, or in an area of Maine where they’ll move after their education is completed. The Department of Labor is working on making the program more effective and able to serve more students, so it can help more Maine residents get out of poverty and into a good job.