Dates: October 1, 2023 - June 30, 2028

Award Amount: $600,000/yr

The UPREACH grant prioritizes Hispanic, Latine, and Chicano/a/x students by uniting PCC's resources with culturally relevant and identity-affirming programming to empower and accelerate completion for these groups and other minoritized populations.

The UPREACH Grant will:

  • Unify PCC’s career, academic, and social advising infrastructure so students receive consistent and holistic supports. Establish triage procedures to connect students with appropriate services, improve communications to provide early/intrusive messaging.
  • Interweave instruction and “career” in high-demand courses, foster Hispanic/Latine students’ vocational identity, and create robust calendar of career and financial wellness related events.
  • Elevate Student Voice: Equipo students will serve as peer researchers to inform decision making both in the project and college-wide.
  • Establish an HSI Strategic Initiatives Team to provide direction and leadership and launch a faculty-student Participatory Action Research community focused on issues of access, retention, success, and engagement.
  • Work with providers to unify our current technologies and build a single campus-wide customer relationship management system (CRM) to provide a student-friendly, seamless solution.
  • Work with students, faculty, staff to access and utilize the CRM to ensure Hispanic/Latine students benefits from this streamlined technology

UPREACH

Project Goals

  1. Academic Programs: Strengthen academic and career alignment through a unified approach that honors the role of faculty in students’ vocational identity development. Foster servingness among PCC faculty and encourage faculty-student connections to increase Hispanic/Latine students' sense of belonging.
  2. Institutional Management: Develop a unified approach to personalized care by bringing key academic, career, and social support services into a networked Success Team coaching model.
  3. Fiscal Stability: Increase student outcomes and close equity gaps to ensure alignment with state-mandated performance-based funding focused on student equity and student success.

Competitive Preference Priority 2: Increase postsecondary education access, affordability, completion, and post-enrollment success by setting Hispanic/Latine students up for success

Project Objectives

By September 30, 2028, PCC will increase

  1. Increase Hispanic/Latine student enrollment from 14,176 (2021-22 baseline) to 15,000
  2. Increase Hispanic/Latine student retention from 78.4% (2021-22 baseline) to 85%
  3. Increase Hispanic/Latine student overall course success rates from 59.5% (2021-22 baseline) to 65%
  4. Increase Hispanic/Latine student completion of transfer-level English in the first year from 47% (2021-22 baseline) to 55%
  5. Increase Hispanic/Latine student completion of transfer-level STEM math from 36% (2021-22 baseline) to 42%
  6. Increase Hispanic/Latine student completion of transfer-level non-STEM (SLAM) math from 45% (2021-22 baseline) to 52%
  7. Increase self-reported sense of belonging from 53% (spring 2022 baseline) to 63%
  8. Increase Hispanic/Latine student participation in work-based learning activities from 1,884 (2021-2022) to 3,500
  9. Increase Hispanic/Latine student consultations

Personnel

Project Director – Dr. Myriam Altounji
Activity Director - Dra. Desiree Zuniga
Equipo Leaders - Visit https://pasadena.edu/about/hsi/equipo.php