Generation Hope Announces Winners of the "Our Campus, Our Voice" Challenge

WASHINGTON, Jan. 13, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Nonprofit Generation Hope announced today the winners of its "Our Campus, Our Voice" Challenge, an initiative to create more family-friendly college campuses for student parents. The 12 Challenge winners will each receive $500 or more in mini grants to fund a project of their choosing, which must be completed by June 2022.

Generation Hope engages education and policy partners to drive systemic change and provides direct support to parenting students (Scholars) in college and their children. The organization provides their Scholars with mentoring, financial assistance, free mental health support, a peer community, career counseling and early childhood education for their children to ensure they graduate.

The "Our Campus, Our Voice" Challenge puts resources and decision making in the hands of student parents to amplify their advocacy and strengthen their leadership skills. Examples of projects include a campus initiative to increase students' knowledge about supplemental food programs like SNAP; focus groups on campus to hear the needs of student parents directly; and collecting toys for children and gift cards for their parents that are distributed at the campus library. Applicants were encouraged to design a project to promote campus inclusivity, create a more family-friendly institution, and employ a race equity lens to improve the higher education experience for student parents, who are more likely to be students of color.

In December 2020, Founder and CEO of Generation Hope, Nicole Lynn Lewis, was an inaugural awardee of The Black Voices for Black Justice Fund, which provided unrestricted funding to Lewis to advance her race equity work. Lewis is using $30k of the funding to seed the "Our Campus, Our Voice" initiative.

"We know that student parents are incredible advocates," Lewis said. "This Challenge recognizes the power of parenting students' lived experiences and centers their voices and ideas in finding solutions to improve college campuses. We created this project to shine a spotlight on the strengths of student parents—a student population that too often flies under the radar in higher ed while systemic barriers stand in the way of them reaching their full potential."

Generation Hope wants the Challenge to inspire higher education institutions across the country to similarly invest in creating more family-friendly campuses to benefit the nearly 5 million parenting college students nationwide.

"We want to reinforce the tremendous assets that student parents bring to their campus community and equip them with what they need to create change on these college campuses," Lewis added. "By putting both resources and decision making in the hands of student parents who are disproportionately students of color, Generation Hope is also addressing the racial inequities that exist within the higher education system."

Of the 12 winners, ten are recent college graduates and Generation Hope alumni; two are current Scholars, attending or having attended the schools where they will be implementing their projects. The following institutions will benefit from their ideas:

• George Mason University
• George Washington University
• Howard University
• Montgomery College
• Morgan State University
• Northern Virginia Community College
• Trinity Washington University
• University of Maryland Global Campus
• Wilson College

"My project will involve interviewing current and former student parents from Howard University about their experiences and challenges during their time on campus," said Joseph Yusuf, a recent Howard University graduate, father, and Challenge winner. "Most colleges are not designed with student parents in mind. I'm grateful to receive the resources and opportunity to implement my ideas to create a better family-friendly campus environment for other student parents."

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A nonprofit founded in 2010, Generation Hope engages education and policy partners to drive systemic change and provides direct support to teen parents in college, as well as their children, through holistic, two-generation programming to ensure all student parents have the opportunities to succeed and experience economic mobility. Fewer than 2% of teen mothers will earn their college degrees before they are 30 years old, yet Generation Hope Scholars graduate at a rate that exceeds the national average for all college students. Generation Hope engages in local and national advocacy work, amplifying the student parent voice and centering their experiences. Additionally, Generation Hope leverages its data and best practices to provide colleges with the tools, resources, and support that they need to improve outcomes for student parents.

SOURCE Generation Hope