About Us

The College-Career Workshops arose out of a need to empower youth in Holyoke, Massachusetts to succeed in school, go on to college, and obtain a rewarding career.

Holyoke is a post-industrial city with a large immigrant population and high rates of poverty. It has some of the highest dropout rates in the state, and a disproportionate percentage of its disadvantaged youth do not graduate or go on to college.

In 2002, El Arco Iris Youth and Community Arts Center, a small community-based after-school program, obtained a grant from the Davis Foundation to design and implement a series of college-bound workshops to address this critical need. The program actively engaged college students from local colleges, along with peer leaders and program staff, in designing, planning and leading the workshops. This project was named “Youth with a Future” by the youth participants, and resulted in a pilot series of workshops to inspire young people to succeed in school and go on to college, while giving them the tools to do so.

A few years later, the Holyoke Planning Network, a partnership of local colleges and community programs, and UMass Amherst applied for and obtained a Community Outreach Partnership Center (COPC) grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to develop more effective partnerships between area institutions of higher learning and community organizations in Holyoke. One of the projects of this grant was to design and create a series of college/career workshops. This project, modeled after the Davis Foundation funded model, utilized an approach that was intended to engage the youth and staff from several youth programs, and college students and staff from multiple campuses, in working collaboratively to design and implement the workshops. This collaboration included the Amherst College Community Outreach Program, Hampshire College Community Partnerships for Social Change, Holyoke Community College AVANZA project, the University of Massachusetts Extension 4-H program and Student Bridges program, El Arco Iris after-school program, Girls Inc, Nuestras Raices, the Teen Resource Project, Youth Leadership in the Arts, and NEARI-JumpStart. This collaboration was unique in that it involved college students across multiple campuses working together, and it gave a high degree of responsibility and control to the college students to design and implement the workshops.

Focus groups with the youth, and discussions among the community program and academic community staff underscored that youth in the disadvantaged neighborhoods of Holyoke disproportionately lacked the information, resources, support and knowledge of their options beyond high school and the steps they need to take to get there.

Over a period of three years, this team established a series of workshops targeting the low-income and underserved youth of Holyoke. The workshops were designed to be as experiential and fun as possible, emphasizing both college awareness and college preparation. They also incorporated field trips to area colleges so the youth could experience college life. College students from diverse backgrounds were actively involved as mentors to show the youth that higher education is accessible to them. In the process, the program staff, the youth, and the college staff developed trusting and constructive relationships, and the youth discovered options available to them that they had been unaware of, or felt were unattainable.

The experiences and learning of this effort provide the basis for this workbook. It is not intended to be a blueprint, but more a document that describes the process and the learning that resulted. We hope it also offers some useful guidelines and recommendations that other organizations and partners can use to create their own series of workshops to empower youth in Holyoke and other disadvantaged communities to follow a college and career path and to succeed in life.