Boston, Mass--More than 60 formerly off-track students who earned their HiSet and are going to college were honored at College Bound Dorchester’s 6th annual “I am My Future” Matriculation Celebration at Roxbury Community College on August 23. The group included several members of the nonprofit’s Boston Uncornered initiative, which sets high expectations for the former gang members they call Core Influencers and supports their social-emotional development through neighborhood-based mentors and education stipends.
Boston Uncornered is the nation’s only “corner-to-college” model to ensure Core Influencers obtain a college credential and family-sustaining wage. Instead of feeling cornered by past mistakes, these Core Influencers are proving to their peers that education, not crime, is the best path for them to follow to achieve economic success.
Matriculation speaker and Boston Uncornered student Joao Pereira said without the support of Boston Uncornered, he would be either in jail or dead. Before he joined College Bound Dorchester he spent more than twelve years incarcerated. “I now see a future without concrete and steel,” he said.
“I used to dream of finishing school and traveling the world reporting about the various states of humanity. Thanks to College Bound, the dream is within my reach.” Pereira is studying Broadcast Media Technology at Roxbury Community College.
Kismauri Pena, one of several Boston Uncornered students who wore a cap and gown at Matriculation, was inspired by her daughter Destini. “I was ready to do it for my daughter. I have to fight for her,” she said. She is a Bunker Hill College student working hard, with the help of Boston Uncornered, to put a past behind her that included incarceration. She dreams of owning her own home someday.
CBD College Readiness Advisor (CRA )Kenny Schoonmaker talked about how he supports his students. “People don’t always see the good in our guys, he said. “It remains buried under the pain, the challenges, and the hurt of being dismissed time and time again. I want to be the support that these guys didn’t have. The support that I didn’t have. I’m not different from my students – I was these guys. I am these guys.” CRA’s are in constant contact with their students, helping them get whatever they need to be successful in school and providing constant social-emotional guidance.
College Bound Dorchester Founder & CEO Mark Culliton based the Boston Uncornered initiative on the idea that the intelligence and charisma of Core Influencers gives them the potential to become positive role models within their communities. By earning a degree and showing their neighborhood peers that there is another, better way to earn an honest living, these formerly disengaged youth can become positive influencers who encourage others to clean up their acts, go back to school, and build the skills to earn a living wage. In doing so, they will help lower prison recidivism, reduce gang violence and diminish (and ultimately end) systemic generational urban poverty.
Over the next three years, College Bound Dorchester will engage more than 500 Core Influencers from six of Boston’s 14 “hotspots”, of violence. In Boston, 3,500 gang members (only one percent of the youth population) are responsible for 74 percent of all shootings in the city on only five percent of the city’s street corners. The organization is working with researchers from the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University to evaluate the program with the goal of making it a national model.
SOURCE College Bound Dorchester
