Do low-income college students who receive public benefits stay in school longer and complete their studies faster? A new initiative that will launch in the 2012 summer at select community colleges will test this notion and work to provide models that other community colleges can implement and sustain.

The three-year $4.84 million initiative, Benefits Access for College Completion (BACC), is led by the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) and the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) with funding from the Ford Foundation, Kresge Foundation, Lumina Foundation, and the Open Society Foundations. The Annie E. Casey Foundation is also contributing to the initiative.

“We are committed to student completion and appreciate the major investment these foundations are making,” AACC President Walter G. Bumphus said. “Their collaborative vision will help community colleges identify the best ways for students to access the benefits and services they need to finish what they start.”

LaGuardia Community College President Gail Mellow said the initiative is a “huge opportunity” to help “financially troubled students get the benefits they are eligible to receive” and to help “shape the policy environment.”

Of the close to 8 million credit students annually attending community colleges, 46% currently receive some form of financial aid (state, federal, or institutional). The additional benefits the students might access through BACC include a range of federal programs, such as those that provide health insurance, food, and child care. Such support services are especially critical for community college students, many of whom juggle work, studies, and family responsibilities.

Colleges selected for the BACC planning phase are: Cuyahoga Community College (OH), Gateway Community and Technical College and Owensboro Community and Technical College (KY), LaGuardia Community College (NY), Northampton Community College (PA), and Skyline College (CA).  Macomb Community College and Lake Michigan Community College also will participate and share perspectives from similar work in Michigan.

During the initiative, participating colleges will become social innovators that integrate access to federal and state supports and other existing public resources into college operations, in some ways redefining the concept of financial aid and student supports. It is the hope that by working directly with local and state benefits administrators to eliminate policy barriers and align services, community colleges will help students finish their programs of study faster and move to economic self-sufficiency.

At the end of the initiative, the BACC team hopes to use lessons learned to expand what works across the nation’s more than 1,200 community colleges.

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A 32-year-old waitress in Hollywood, Florida is on the move once again. This time she is organizing a massive jobs initiative that calls for big businesses to offer employment opportunities to the communities that have supported their success. Denny’s Restaurants has taken the lead by partnering with The Rebuild Your Life Project, Patterson’s empowerment outreach for women.

“I hope that other American big businesses decide to partner with The Rebuild Your Life Project,” Patterson said. “This is a great way for big businesses to attract the type of employees that really want to contribute their skills and it helps to debunk the myth that large corporations do not care about the very people who have helped them to achieve their level of success.”

In April 2011, Patterson, the creator of The Rebuild Your Life Project, an empowerment outreach aimed to teach women to overcome their fear of failure, gave away everything that she owned and moved out of her apartment, becoming homeless on purpose in the city of Hollywood, Florida. Patterson aimed to show women what their biggest fear looked like and teach them how to survive it by watching her do it.

During the 4 months that Patterson was homeless from April 2011 through August 2011, she made a call to action to 30 businesses to participate in a job fair for homeless women and women in distress to help women rebuild their lives.

Patterson organized and executed The Rebuild Your Life Job Fair, raised money through her tips and wages to offer a $650 rental assistance grant to a woman in need, while teaching mental strategies for successfully navigating the obstacles women face when trying to rebuild their lives. She managed to document the entire journey into and out of homelessness in video on her YouTube channel.

After securing a job as a waitress at Denny’s Restaurant, Patterson partnered with the international corporation to hold a mass hiring event in South Florida. On December 20, 2011 more than 100 unemployed residents from Miami-Dade and Broward counties participated in open interviews for the 14 participating corporate owned Denny’s restaurants that partnered with Patterson in support of The Rebuild Your Life Project.

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