There is a difference in merely attending school, and engaging in one’s education. The Student Advisory Board (SAB) of the McNeill Academic Program acknowledges this difference and creates a community dedicated to equitable access to higher education and collaboration between students and teachers. Many of us at the McNeill program are low-income and/or first generation students who work part-time or full-time during the academic year to support our education and families. This burden makes it so that students often do not pursue unpaid internships and study abroad programs; then grew the crowdfunding project as an effort to alleviate some of the financial hardships students face to encourage our students to pursue theses and all opportunities that may advance their education, professionally and personally.
SAB worked in collaboration with CU Crowdfunding Program Coordinator, Mia Fill, and the McNeill Academic Program staff: Sophie Low (Program Director) and Graduate Assistant, Jennifer Motolenich, to initiate idea invention and sustain communication throughout the project. Ruby Baca, an SAB board member, worked with videographer, Nicholas Edwards, to create a short video highlighting the purpose of the initiative. They were able to transcribe a script for the video and interview senior students about their experience at McNeill. After several editing meetings we were able to publish our crowdfunding campaign and create flyers to post around the CU campus. We then went through a process of sharing the video with students, family, and friends, in an aim to extend our reach which promised to be the most difficult part of the entire campaign, but also sparked great reflections for future revisions for crowdfunding. As a means of promoting the campaign, we were able to schedule a meeting with the Daily Camera and had an interview published by late-April which detailed our motivation for the project; and, by May we also had an article published in CU Today which was able create some visibility of the project and the McNeill Program to the greater CU community.
The Board created a crowdfunding campaign to mobilize our community of scholars as well as foster engagement with local people who support our mission. The Board advocates for the McNeill Academic Program’s aim of supporting underrepresented and historically marginalized students through community-based action. The campaign we initiated was conscious and intentional about collecting donations in order to assist some of our students whose academic, professional, and personal progress at the University may be halted due to unmet financial needs. With this in mind, we collected a substantial amount of donations with the intent to provide students with financial assistance for unpaid opportunities (e.g. unpaid internships, research assistants, teaching assistants). From this experience, we were able to learn and apply skills regarding fundraising, work on community projects and more importantly, we gained rewarding experiences of social work that benefits the community.
In the future we would like to do more work to improve the hallway and communal spaces with culturally relevant, student artwork in the spaces of Fleming where McNeill is housed. It would be wonderful to fundraise for these efforts and encourage local artists to donate pieces and/or their time. Another consideration has been to develop workshops around identity, social issues, and partner with on-campus student groups to encourage our community to get involved. We plan to have this crowdfunding project repeat every year as a part of upcoming SAB projects.
SAB Members: Adán García, Ruby Baca, Destiny Breckenridge, Yang Li
Advisors: Sophie Low, Jennifer Motolenich