HIGH BEAM Foundation

HIGH BEAM Foundation (HBF) addresses the lagging college graduation rates of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Studies like Georgetown’s Born to Win, Schooled to Lose show a direct correlation between income potential and college completion. We do not believe that education equity and inclusivity can be addressed without more college graduates of color and from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. 

With more college graduates, the BIPOC community benefits from a greater number of people qualifying for higher level positions in companies, organizations, and government. These are the places where decisions are made and if we want policies and decisions to be inclusive of BIPOC communities, then the community members must hold some of these positions. During my research on our launch market of San Jose, I found public high school leadership to have <10% of leadership to be BIPOC. While charter schools fared better, BIPOC representation was still far less than 40%. How can the BIPOC community hope to take a seat at the table if they don’t ensure a variety of candidates who can qualify for such positions?

We believe there is strength in numbers and BIPOC communities will strengthen with more college graduates. Not just students who are natural go-getters, but also the students who have the potential in them, but may not have had a “switch” turned on in them that gives them the drive and staying power that natural go-getters have. We believe they play an important role in changing the tide for BIPOC communities. The dropout rate is astounding and includes even bright students on scholarship. The Ballard Center at Brigham Young University published a paper summing up what we found in our own research: “The achievement gap affects students by increasing dropout rates. It involves the nation by costing the US nearly $700 billion annually. Even more grave than the financial consequences is the loss of every student—each with untold potential.” This says to us that there is work to be done in the area of resilience, will, developing non-academic skills, and managing a new environment/maximizing opportunities.

If the aim is to get a more diverse (racially and socioeconomically) student body into and through college, then our free program to broaden perspectives, develop the will and help students find the way to attend college is a perfect fit within the larger landscape we’re in. We can’t afford to let just the natural go-getters move up. For critical mass to make a difference in communities, we must help develop potential and we are banking on the transformational power of travel to help with the inner spark, which needs to sustain the students through college. We aim to help them get excited about life after college so that they’ll be more invested in opportunities that lead up to it. 

Our program starts with one week of international travel where we aim to disrupt the way the students see the world around them. We immerse them in a different culture, visit companies to hear about jobs they may have never heard of, hear about people’s education-to-career arc, and learn a bit of independence. Upon returning, there’s a two-year program of personal development tracks to help them develop skills we believe will help them succeed in college and beyond: self awareness (eg. personalities, how to manage relationships, how to ask for help), time management, communication, personal finance, and college environment preparation. They also continue visiting companies to hear about unique work that could help contextualize their education, if not get them excited about a career, and they receive mentorship from a working professional as well as a current college student. Our support system and some volunteers come from across the U.S. and different countries so we are often reliant on video conferencing to bring us all together. Much of our work in time management now has the students relying on calendaring, notes, and reminder apps and we plan on discussing project management apps, as well.

We have a simple idea involving intricate execution, but it’s another option for these students and after compounded disadvantages, an abundance of options could make the difference in closing the college attainment gap. This vision, when proven successful by several cohorts, could change the way people think of creating access to education. It takes effort to foster the same spirit and drive that middle or upper class students may have had at home to students who didn’t necessarily have the encouragement or opportunities their whole lives. To do this in two years is a challenge, but one well worth overcoming. I would love to be able to refer our cohort members to other programs or organizations in order to support a different part of their growth. Perhaps in the future, someone at a YMCA or at a STEAM program identifies someone with potential and refers a student to us to help with non-academic development. It’s part of our dream.

Our target population is high school students from underserved families. In creating our program, we vetted the idea with dozens of interviews with nonprofits serving the same

community, community leaders, educators, counselors, and community members and still continue to do so as often as we can. Our first few cohorts are going to purposely be kept small not only so that we may test our logistics and overall program, but also so that we can gather feedback (via conversations and planned periodic surveys) from the students, parents, teachers, and mentors. We think that in launching this way, we can build the firmest foundation possible as we take on more students. The feedback we seek is crucial to us and by keeping our first few cohorts small, we will be better able to make changes and pivot more quickly. We are also recruiting for our board with an eye toward reflecting the communities we serve now and in the future.

Education provides people with more choices than a non-graduate would typically have. Those choices mean a person can be flexible in the type of work they do to sustain themselves. One of the many devastating things we witnessed during the pandemic is how vulnerable some types of work are to disasters, but even without such devastation, flexibility and choices mean opportunities to pursue a different career if needed or desired. People wouldn’t necessarily be resigned to one career just for necessity or convenience. We want our students to grow up to be people who are confident in their knowledge, abilities, and opportunities.

With more college graduates, the BIPOC community benefits from a greater number of people qualifying for higher level positions in companies, organizations, and government. These are the places where decisions are made and if we want policies and decisions to be inclusive of BIPOC communities, then the community members must hold some of these positions.

Our program was influenced by Yasmin’s experience as an immigrant and person of color. Her family's financial struggles and culture clashes may be different from those of this generation of students, but there are still some similarities in our experiences, which makes a difference when nurturing relationships with community members. She knows the impact of seeing people who look like me in a wide variety of jobs, she remembers how unfamiliar her parents were with the U.S. college system and application process, and she remembers her parents' fear of the possibility of her going to college somewhere far away. She invited her parents to recruit students with her and as they spoke to the students' parents, she could see the shared experience in their faces. Because of this, the dozens of conversations we had with other organizations in the space as we vetted the idea, and our plan to survey and obtain feedback often (from students, parents, teachers, and college administrators), we’re confident that we're starting from an informed place in regards to the involvement of the communities we serve.

We may be a nonprofit, but we’re still a small startup and I’ve had almost 15 years of experience working with startups and small businesses, thinking through audience needs, go-to-market plans, and scalability. Yasmin’s work with a variety of companies has shown her the power of a small team’s agility, being able to pivot as necessary, and the many paths to success that can be gained by a college education (eg: network building, communication skills, and recognizing/taking advantage of opportunities). Her unique career path has also populated her network with a myriad of people with unique jobs that spark the imagination.

Aside from Yasmin, the breadth and depth of our experiences are our greatest strengths—particularly those of our board of directors and advisors:

● Teaching low-income high school students and changing their perspective through travel

● Teaching low-income students at community college

● Curriculum development

● Philanthropic partnership development 

● A career filled with researching the link between education and the workforce

● Tour group and travel industry experience

● Same cultural/socioeconomic background as our current cohort

The pilot stage is appropriate because we've only just launched our first cohort last June and are looking to run another test cohort or two before we scale. Our inaugural cohort had eight students and we feel like it was the right amount to make sure our logistics and curriculum were right. We've made it through the travel portion and are about to finish the first year of our curriculum, which was designed alongside a community college professor. We've received positive feedback from the parents in particular and we are witnessing the changes brought about by our personal development tracks — particularly in the case of time management and self awareness.

In Yasmin’s words: I’ve mentored enough startups in various accelerators to know how invaluable a community of like-minded people are. I also value the wisdom of mentors and peers not only for problem-solving potential, but also for galvanizing the spirit and fostering different perspectives.

We believe in our model, but are not too proud to say that we don’t know what we don’t know. We do know we need some pro bono legal services and help with projections regarding finances and scaling. We anticipate this will involve document review for the most part (eg. student contracts, anticipating issues regarding working with minors, compliance), but we'd also love some advisory sessions. We’re also eager to expand our network outside of the Bay Area as we plan to grow market by market as Teach for America (and many other startups) did. Finally, as we would like to involve students from across the country and other international destinations, it would be great to hear perspectives on how we can utilize more technology as we grow.

Our approach isn’t drastically different, but we believe the small differences we implemented, which we haven’t seen elsewhere, will significantly improve college attainment for underserved students. Our way of using travel to “shake up” a student’s perspective has been done to some extent, but not to the depth that we bring it and not as a precursor to a long relationship with the students. The decision to have the long period of personal development sessions came from a suggestion made by a high school educator and has been supported by educators and community members since. The response has  consistently been one of “why hasn’t this been done yet?”

We’ve come across some people who are wary of using travel as a catalyst versus a reward, but our belief is that high school is such a short period of time made even shorter by the fact that college applications are sent early in the fourth year. After a lifetime of disadvantages, it will take a lot to change someone's perspective and we think there is nothing better than travel because not only does it hit you on the spot, but the memories it creates are powerful and long lasting. With the current rhetoric on the uselessness of college and in the face of tough economic times, a new perspective stands to not only affect the student, but other members of their community, which is often tight-knit. We hope to cause a ripple effect that can help identify even more students that we’d like to find a way to work with even if they don’t make it into a cohort. 

Our goal is to increase college graduation rates within the low socioeconomic status students. We hope that the success of these students inspires even more students behind them and as previously mentioned, the larger the pool of qualified graduates, we stand to diversify our policy makers and business leaders within a generation. We’ve already seen how amazed the students have been hearing about unique jobs and how people got them, but more than that, we’ve seen first hand how relieved they became in learning how to use their time. I often bring up the travel experience for them and talk them through how they can use the trip as inspiration, essay topics, social situation story telling, source for learning life skills, and source for building confidence, which has been the most common and noticeable change. If we can help our students become confident in themselves, finding opportunities, and making it through college, we would then be able to consider it as a success.

In the long term, we’d like to be able to do week-long swaps with cohorts from different cities (both domestic and international). We know that we don’t need to take all the students in a city on our program, but we do think the ripple effect will be powerful enough to impact a community.

Our ultimate goal is that cohort members obtain their bachelor’s degrees and embark on careers that can help shrink the college attainment (and racial/wealth) gap. We understand that this will take some time so we will monitor the number of cohort members who successfully start college

-While they’re part of the program, we’ll also monitor:

-Student grades and GPAs

-Initiative-taking and confidence levels with ideas if not with action (as reported by parents

and teachers in addition to our observations)

-Student understanding for how to identify opportunities and manage their lives to make

room to take advantage of them

-Understanding of personal finance

-Communication skills

*Do they initiate conversation and help keep it going?

*Do they have confident voices?

*Non-verbal communication

-Building social networks (so they’re prepared to build professional ones) offline

-Name recognition of the program

We’ll only know if we were successful when the students graduate from college, but until then, we’ll track progress by surveys and conversations with the parents, teachers, and students.

There were many other students who didn’t try or finish their applications because they didn’t think they’d ever be chosen. That mentality can be dangerous. Two post-trip student survey responses stood out as representative of success:

1

“I feel very accomplished about myself because I didn't think I would be able to do what I did without my parents. When it was happening I was too focused in the moment and I didn't really know what I was doing or how I was doing it I just went with it but now that I am reflecting on it I realize that I am capable of a lot more than I think specially [sic] when I was still applying for my visa while managing finals.

I feel different because I feel more exposed to my capabilities and Irealized so may [sic] more things about me like the way I work with groups and people I don't really talk to or have never met before, my way of being independent, and the way I act or work under pressure or around certain people.”

2

“Now that I have traveled to another continent I have realized that traveling is such an amazing aspect and I want to include it in my future job and study. One thing that really captivated me was when we were in Parliament and were listening to the House of Lords and the other House there was this woman that when she spoke she grasped all of our attention and spoke with such authority and passion which made me want to become more confident and want to speak like her.”

While we would love to incorporate more tech into our solution, for this cohort, learning how to maximize their time with calendar, reminder, and notes apps have been the most useful. We take it for granted that all students know how to use all their apps, but it isn’t necessarily so. With our mentorship and company visit programs, we may seem to lean more heavily on traditional knowledge systems, but we think there is room to grow with technology as our cohorts grow farther apart.

Full time: 1

Part time: 1

Volunteers: 7

We've been working on this close to four years.

We don’t have staff yet, but we do plan on working closely with future staff to make sure they have access to as many growth opportunities as possible. In regards to board recruitment, when we started, we focused on getting directors with specific skills from within our network as fast as possible. We did well covering education, philanthropy, and travel, but what that short search showed me was that our instincts were correct. There are not enough people of color to fill as many seats as possible on boards and at executive tables. We are constantly scouting for prospects from within the hispanic community, as the location of our first cohort is predominantly hispanic, but it does take time and effort. Our networks have representatives from a diverse set of people so our outreach is ongoing, but our efforts stretch beyond them, too, as we hope that attending community and industry events will help us expand our reach. We do have plans for inviting members of the communities in which we will operate to sit on either our board of directors or advisory board. 

As we are a nonprofit, we have no revenue model, but we do provide value by helping students develop their will and way to earn a college degree. This happens in-person through lecture, conversation, and experiential learning. Members of the underserved community are not shy in sharing their interest in college, but they know they need help navigating the college application process and environment. They also need help contextualizing the things they learn. It was evident early on when we learned that one of the schools in our system taught their students about self elevator pitches. However, they were unable to use them in a networking event because they didn’t know they should talk about themselves. It’s something the average adult might take for granted, but having the permission to talk about themselves or look out for their interests is a cultural difference that takes time to understand if you are not already in or familiar with the culture. When our populations notice this, the more eager for help they become.

HBF operates on individual donations, corporate giving and in the near future, grants. Our most active sources have been corporate giving with a mix of small companies (approximately $5,000) and our largest donor at $45,000. Individual donations are closing in on $15,000. While we are in our test phase, this has been enough to cover our largest expense—the international trip. Yasmin has experience in business development for the private sector and in partnership development for a major nonprofit foundation and plans to utilize her experience and network for creating funding streams for HBF.