Give Back has evolved through several phases of work, each more impactful than the last. Give Back started by giving low-income, high-performing high school seniors in Illinois $20,000 toward their college education. Next, to be more sustainable with the increasing costs of colleges, we launched a “pre-paid” program whereby selected four-year institutions were given an up-front tranche of funding, in return for a promise by the schools to provide full ride scholarships to Give Back’s students. Give Back partnered with 30 colleges in seven states (Illinois, New Jersey, New York, California, Kansas, Delaware & Pennsylvania), awarding more than 1,500 scholarships to youth.

The work was remarkable and inspirational. But, for all the good it did, Bob realized that at the end of the day, many of these high-performing seniors would likely have graduated from college without his help.

While expanding the pre-paid program in New Jersey and California, Bob met Melissa Helmbrecht and Dr. Amy Young. Melissa, who, like Bob, had survived an abusive parent, was a successful nonprofit social entrepreneur transforming the lives of young people facing adversities in Bridgeton, New Jersey. Dr. Amy Young, one of the country’s preeminent forensic pediatricians, board certified in Child Abuse Pediatrics, was helping young people in the foster care system both personally, as a foster parent, and professionally, as a pediatrician. Her goal was to help young people not only navigate the trauma they endured, but also to graduate college and pursue their dreams.

Together Bob, Melissa and Dr. Young charted a new course for Give Back, focusing on the young people who are least likely to graduate college without our support. In this new model of Give Back, we opened our selection criteria, no longer only supporting those with high GPAs, and looked to support young people who have experienced significant adversities such as foster care, homelessness, the incarceration of a parent and/or being victim of a crime.

Working with our college partners, we learned what it takes to help young people who faced great adversities succeed in college. We learned that providing young people a long-term, highly trained coach was often even more important than the scholarship. We learned the power of helping students create a forward-looking Student Action Plan – envisioning a future with post-secondary education and seeing the steps to get there was often transformational. And, when life’s challenges interrupted their plans, we learned that too many kids lacked what the renowned Harvard Professor Robert Putnam dubbed “social air bags,” there to ensure that when your life hits a bump in the road you walk away unharmed. Putnam noted that when affluent kids stumble, a parent or someone else often jumps in to help, for example finding a tutor or therapist or covering car repairs. Putnam found that lower income children weren’t able to access the same types of support.

We found the same: having a coach there to step in at the right time, empowered to pay for assistance as needed, made all the difference. Often it took no more than $100 to prevent a one-time incident from derailing a student’s whole future. We also found that a coach could almost always help students get scholarships from other existing programs. We learned that young people didn’t always want to go to the handful of colleges Give Back had partnered with. And, perhaps most powerfully, we learned that not all young people wanted to go to four-year colleges, nor needed to. Many could pursue their dreams more directly and access a career pathway toward a family sustaining wage by going to trade schools, certification courses and apprenticeship programs.

This led to the current Give Back program, called Give Back Careers. Give Back Careers doubles down on our coaching model, extending the duration from middle school through young adulthood (early to mid-20s), opening the program to work with any post-secondary institution a young person is interested in pursuing, and supporting students’ transition into the workforce. Instead of providing a Give Back scholarship to a limited number of students, our coaches instead help all our students successfully apply for a combination of financial aid and scholarships, allowing us to scale the number of students we help.

Give Back Careers deepens our focus on the young people that data shows are least likely to graduate high school, post-secondary programs, or enter a career path toward jobs with family sustaining wages without our support. Give Back Careers has expanded to additional states (Washington, Minnesota, Maryland, North Carolina, Florida and Kentucky) and allows us to provide our services to young people nationwide even if we don’t have a chapter nearby.

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