Carolyn De Jesus Martinez, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, spent a chunk of her high school years bouncing around homeless shelters in Boston. As a result, she said, school became “a very safe space” for her, and she founded her own “girls who code” club.
Yet with limited financial resources, and the pressing need to provide money for her family, her dream of attending college faced an uphill battle – until her guidance counselor recommended that she apply to the Upward Project, a Boston-based program that provides stipends and academic support to first-generation college students.
“Even the summer before I went to school, they set me off with a laptop and also we had professional clothing, attire that they bought for us,” Martinez said. “The Upward Project helped me pay for my health insurance.”
Martinez, now 26, credits the program with enabling her graduation from Wesleyan University in Connecticut with math and computer science degrees. She now works for a restaurant management company and last year bought a house in western Massachusetts, she said.
Mindy Wright, a former history teacher at Boston Preparatory Charter Public School, founded the Upward Project in 2018 as a way to help first-generation, underprivileged college students “navigate a very unfamiliar space,” she said.
The program has grown more than threefold over the past eight years, from six participants in 2018 to twenty spots available in this year’s cohort. It all started with the help of one “angel investor,” Wright said, and now 80 percent of its fundraising dollars comes from individual donors.
“The experience of a first-gen, low-income student is very different than that of a student who might come from a middle-class or more affluent background,” Wright said. “So much of the work that we’re doing at the Upward Project is … replicating the suite of privileges that many of our students’ affluent peers have access to.”
Participants are chosen from among high-achieving high school seniors across Boston. Once accepted, they have access to internship funding, mental health resources, and a $10,000 fund they are free to draw from during their four years at college.
“That [fund] is what allows our students to be full citizens on their college campus,” Wright said. “Should an emergency come up where your laptop is broken, we can replace it, or if you have to fly home for something unexpectedly.”
For Wright, who is herself the daughter of immigrants, many of the programs, stipends, and support systems offered to students come from challenges she personally experienced during her time at Colby College in Maine, where, she said, she felt a sense of isolation made starker by her inability to express her concerns to her parents, whom she “didn’t want to stress out” about college.
“They were supportive and loving when it came to me being in college, but I couldn’t specifically call them with a challenge I was having, because they just would not know how to navigate it,” she said, adding:
“I felt really embarrassed, and nobody around me was articulating their struggle or their frustration or how isolated they felt. I felt like I was very much kind of navigating it on my own.”
Diana Alvarado, the Upward Project’s senior program manager, said a large part of her job entails giving moral support to students who often are minority members of primarily white institutions.
“I think college has a very particular way of making you very aware of your identities,” she said, noting that teens from Boston are used to existing in specific immigrant communities, and that their identities often become reductively simplified in college.
If you’re “the only Latinx student in a room, or the only student from an urban area in a room, that is usually pretty palpable,” she said.
Once the program’s crop of students is selected, Wright said, the acceptees first do a “two-week summer intensive,” where they go over details about health insurance, accommodation requests, and placement exams.
Program administrators then stay in close contact with the students throughout college. Martinez said that while she went through a mental health struggle at Wesleyan, Wright helped her continue applying to internships while she saw a therapist.
“We really pride ourselves on our individualized, personalized, culturally responsive approach that we’re taking, and that’s something that I don’t think is happening anywhere else,” Wright said.
This story is a product of a partnership between the Dorchester Reporter and the Boston University Department of Journalism.