Pathways Expands
Calvin College's successful Pathways to Possibilities program is expanding to Holland.
Beginning this month Calvin will be working with Maple Avenue Ministries and Cambodian Fellowship in an expansion of efforts to get youth excited about education. A third Holland church may be added to the partnership in the near future.
The expansion will give Calvin church-partnerships in three West Michigan communities. For the past three years the Christian college has partnered with 10 churches in Grand Rapids and two in Muskegon under the Pathways to Possibilities umbrella.
The program had been funded by a $600,000 grant from the Battle Creek based Kellogg foundation. That grant ran out at the end of 1999 but new gifts have come to Calvin from two West Michigan corporations, Herman Miller, Inc., and Meijer. Those gifts will fund the expanded program for another three years.
In addition a $90,000 grant from the New York based Ford Foundation is helping Calvin develop a model to take Possibilties nationally. A March 9-11 invitation-only summit at Calvin will include a talk by UC Berkeley anthropologist John Ogbu who will focus on resiliency in youth and look at why some kids make it and some don't.
"These," says Calvin dean Steve Timmermans, "are exciting times for the Possibilities program."
When the Pathways to Possibilities program began in January 1997 the goals were broad.
At the time Timmermans said: "We hope and pray that inner city children and adolescents will value learning, seek academic success and higher education, become aware of career opportunities and strive to live responsible lives. We will work together with homes, schools, churches and the college to nurture students and help them realize their potential."
After three years of work Timmermans and Rhae-Ann Booker, Director of Pre-College Programs at Calvin (pictured above), say the goals are being met.
There are almost 1,400 young people in the "Possibilities pipeline" right now. Booker and Timmermans believes that better than 80 percent of those young people will graduate from high school and go on to some sort of post-secondary education. Why do they believe that?
Because in the three years that Possibilities has existed there have been 82 youth that have been in the program and reached post high school age. Almost 80 percent (65 of the 82) went on to post-secondary education, either community college, four-year college or vocational school. That total includes eight who went to Calvin and 61 of 65 who continued their schooling in the state of Michigan.
"The Possibilities program is working," says Timmermans. "We're just starting to see the first wave of results now with students coming out of high school in small numbers. But in the next three years we will see greater and greater numbers of Possibilities kids graduating high school and going on to college. And now, of course, those students will not only be from Grand Rapids and Muskegon, but also from Holland."
Booker is especially excited that Possibilities in Holland will be representative of Holland's diverse population. Chris Grier of Holland will be the Possibilities coordinator for Maple Avenue Ministries and he is looking forward to impacting African American youth in a positive way, even as he was once impacted as an African American youth growing up in Baldwin. The Possibilities leadership at the Cambodian Fellowship includes pastor Socheth Na.
Possibilities consists of four initiatives. There is the Campus Visit program that brings fourth through 12th graders to Calvin's campus (and other campuses) monthly for educational programs. The STEP (Striving Toward Educational Possibilities) Conference takes place each summer and offers 7th-10th graders a weekend of simulated college-level courses, workshops, and more. The Entrada Scholars Program is an intense, three-week summer program during which high school junior and seniors take a Calvin summer school class and live on campus. And Possibilities also works on local church enhancement, underwriting and supporting work that the churches, most of which are in center city neighborhoods, want to do with their young people.