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August 2000, Volume 68, Number 4 |
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A Dream Comes TrueBy JENNIFER REESE A decade ago, a group of MBA students set about building a future for kids in East Palo Alto. It became a dream that changed everyone's life.
In 1991, Michael and a few friends from the MBA Class of 1992 founded an innovative program to see if they might be able to help a group of East Palo Alto third and fourth graders succeed in graduating from high school. They planned to tutor and mentor the kids-and if the youngsters made it that far, to help them pay for college. The program was modeled on the famous "I Have a Dream" (IHAD) program started 10 years before in Harlem. But it was complicated by the fact that none of its founders would be around when the "Dreamers" graduated from high school. A decade later the remarkable program Michael founded has not only survived, it has flourished. This spring 35 out of 38 members of the original East Palo Alto fourth grade class graduated from high school. More than 30 of them are heading for college in the fall. The numbers alone are astounding. The program has been, by all accounts, a resounding success. It's a story that has many, many heroes, not least of all the East Palo Alto students themselves, who have struggled to make the most of the opportunities and challenges that have come their way. They have been regularly confronted by new and difficult situations, from affluent private schools to SAT prep courses, and they have had to deal with poverty, language barriers, and social problems in addition to the usual adolescent woes. They are generally very aware of the fact that they have been extremely fortunate to have been hooked up with the IHAD program. "I've always had this hard working mentality," says Rolando Ramirez, who will be attending UC-Berkeley next year. "But if it hadn't been for all these opportunities I've been given, I don't think I would have known what to work hard for." Ramirez' brother Oram, now a high school junior, agrees. "Being part of the program always made me feel special and very privileged," he says. "It changed the way I carry myself and kept me very optimistic." The original I Have a Dream program was founded in 1981 when a businessman named Eugene Lang visited his grade school alma mater in East Harlem and announced on the spur of the moment that he'd pay the college tuition of any student who graduated from high school. He named his program after Martin Luther King Jr.'s legendary speech in 1963. Students, he said, needed to have dreams. And he would do everything he could to help them achieve those dreams, including helping them get to college—and then he would help them pay for it.
In 1991, Michael and a handful of classmates started soliciting donations from alums, students, and corporations, as well as a $2,000 grant from a Business School philanthropy class. "We found a very receptive audience," recalls Peter Dumanian, MBA '92 and general partner at Red Rock Ventures, who helped raise the money and is now vice president of the East Palo Alto IHAD board. The group named their program "Building Futures Now" (it would become "I Have a Dream" the following year) and chose to "adopt" two classes from the predominantly African American and Hispanic Flood School in East Palo Alto. With some 60 Business School volunteers, they started a Wednesday gym program and a series of educational field trips with all 58 third- and fourth-graders. By the following year, the MBAs involved had raised $450,000 and could officially guarantee $1,200 a year college tuition to all of the program's students. Because the founders were set to graduate—and would not be able to remain actively involved—they established a freestanding IHAD board, made up of alums, community leaders, and faculty, who would oversee the program when they were gone. The final piece was put in place when the board hired a full-time coordinator, Sister Georgianna Coonis, a nun in the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur order and a former elementary school teacher. Her role: Stay in touch with the Dreamers, be an advocate for them, and keep the program running smoothly on a day-to-day basis for the next 10 years or so until the Dreamers had all graduated from high school. While IHAD originally was founded on the promise of college tuition assistance, money, it turns out, was only a small piece of the equation. "What Lang found out is what we found out: It's much more the supportive services that matter," says Dumanian. To bring students to the point where college was even a possibility, someone needed to be constantly steering them in that direction. Someone had to watch that they weren't overlooked at school; that they took courses that weren't too easy for them—or too difficult; that they didn't get overwhelmed by peer pressure; that they did their homework; and that they enrolled in SAT preparatory classes. This is true, of course, of all kids. In the case of middle- and upper-class children, the job usually falls to parents, who know the drill. In the case of the East Palo Alto Dreamers, many of their parents a lot of them single hadn't gone to college. And many were grappling with financial problems and language barriers themselves. "If someone asked me what my job was, I'd say it was doing anything the kids needed to succeed," says Coonis. "If there's a fire, that's where I am. I've been mother, counselor, teacher." Sister Georgi's not exaggerating. Coonis's role in supporting the Dreamers has been crucial. She has done everything from buying them cold medicine and jackets to talking to them about their social anxieties, to pushing them to apply for scholarships and summer school programs. "She's like a love resource," says Oram Ramirez, whose mother died shortly after his family emigrated from Mexico in 1991. "She really cares about us." Oram's sister Brenda has turned to Coonis repeatedly with questions she wasn't comfortable asking her father.
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