We sat down with Aaron Randolph, executive director of Carolina Youth Coalition (CYC), and asked him a few questions about the impact of the WIF grant from 2021.
How are the funds being utilized?
CYC has expanded the program to include ninth grade. The WIF funds were primarily used to hire a program director for underclassmen programs. This person will launch and design the ninth-grade program. Currently, we have 22 ninth graders and want to grow the program to 30 next semester.
We started a college persistence platform supporting students and tracking data on them. CYC is using Grad Snap developed by the Dell Foundation, which sells the program they developed for their own programs to other organizations to help them track their progress and impact.
Have you established any new community or organizational partnerships or received any community publicity since your grant payment?
We received Chromebooks to support our program from CMS and 60 laptops from Foundation For The Carolinas and E2D. Student fellows are involved in producing a podcast where they bring on influential community members to talk about their career path, including one of the first black golfers on the PGA tour and the CEO of Honeywell.
Our community partnerships include CMS, Upchieve, and Tutor Associates that provide holistic, upscale tutoring services to our fellows for free. These services would typically cost $250-$300 an hour.
Are there any “standout” examples that you can provide from receiving the funding?
“One of the things we pride ourselves on is the opportunity for fellows to attend college. We accept DACA and undocumented students. North Carolina is a locked-out state, which means that if you have DACA status, you are ineligible for in-state tuition prices or tuition support services or grants. I can think of one young lady that we helped apply for a Dream US scholarship. The scholarship pairs them with universities nationally. She got a full scholarship to Eastern Connecticut State University but had never been out of NC. There was a barrier to going out of state when she had never traveled. We have a persistent director who took her to visit the campus. They took a bus from Charlotte to D.C. and then rented a car and drove to CT so she could see the campus. After that, her parents decided to let her go. She is up there this fall in her first semester. It pains me that she had to go through that to attend college, but I am proud of her resilience to do that at the same time. And it shows the lengths we went to in order to give her that opportunity.”
Please share with our membership anything you’d like us to know about your impact in the community, how our membership can further support your organization, and how we can stay in touch. 
CYC is currently recruiting for our mentorship program. See the attached. It was also sent to Patricia and Jennifer Dixon to communicate the opportunity to our membership. The deadline is 12/31/2021 (50 mentors in 50 days). Members can reach out to JaDora Ross (jadora@carolinayouth.org).
Is there anything else that you think WIF should know at this time about your organization or population served?
We have 78 college students now. Next year, we are adding 60 new students and then will have 136 students the following year. The population served is students (primarily those of color) who are first in their family to go to college, high achieving (3.0 or higher GPA), and from families making $60,000 or less a year. Our program provides these students with the best college prep that money can buy and then supports them to stay in college and graduate. College attendance rates for this population are typically 1 in 10 nationally. We have 32 out of 35 students who have matriculated past their first year of college.
