Empowering Youth: Charise’s Success Story
On Tuesday, October 9, we will host our CSF Empowering Youth luncheon. This impactful and inspiring event featuring CSF Scholars and Alumni will celebrate our more than 9,500 college graduates and raise funds to ensure our students receive the support they need to earn a college degree.
CSF Alumna Charise, who is featured on the materials for the luncheon, is all too familiar with the barriers and challenges our students face. As a teenager, she attended five different high schools in different parts of Washington state as she moved around with her father and twin sister.
Then, when she was a junior at Lincoln High School in Tacoma, she first learned about College Success Foundation and the Achievers program that would change her life. While she was applying and interviewing for the program, she moved once again, this time to West Valley High School in Spokane Valley.
“The CSF staff made sure I got on the bus to go to the interview at Central Washington University,” Charise says. Because she and her sister didn’t have enough to eat, she walked around to collect the remains of boxed lunches to provide a few days of meals for them. “Our options were limited and so were our resources,” she says.
Then Charise found out that she had earned the CSF scholarship.
“It was the best day of my life,” she recalls. “Despite all the moves, all the hardships, and all the barriers for me to even consider attending college, I had earned this incredible opportunity.”
CSF paired Charise with a mentor who showed her that college was possible and was there for her when she struggled along the way. “I’ve learned that family is something you can create,” she says.
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a master’s degree from Eastern Washington University, Charise enrolled in a PhD program at Washington State University to study higher education policy and support programs for underserved students. While she was a PhD student, she got the chance to help others who were facing similar challenges as low-income students. She applied to be a graduate assistant and partnered with CSF to support CSF Scholars on campus.
“I was excited to be part of it again,” she says. “Being able to work with CSF Scholars as an academic coach allowed me the opportunity to finish my doctorate and pursue the path of paving a better, more accessible path for scholars like the ones served by CSF.”
Charise earned her PhD in cultural studies and social thought in education in May 2017. She is now Assistant Director of University of Minnesota, Morris’s McNair Program which is designed to increase graduate degree awards for first-generation, low-income and underrepresented students. She aspires to continue addressing the systemic issues that underrepresented students face in higher education.
“Being a CSF Achiever made my life possible. I would never have imagined getting to where I am without this opportunity and the people it connected me to,” Charise says. “CSF helped me further articulate my passion and my goals for the future.”