Northwest Iowa’s largest community college offers low-income, first-generation, and nontraditional students opportunities to earn degrees in health care, early education, and other fields. This challenge grant supports the construction of a LEED-rated Campus Life and Wellness Center, which serves as a learning laboratory for green-collar jobs programs.

Through its Neighborhood Academic Initiative, a comprehensive six-year college-preparatory program for low-income and minority students in the seventh through 12th grade, the university offers young people in nearby underserved neighborhoods who meet admissions criteria the opportunity to attend USC with full financial support. This grant provides bridge support during a two-year transition period to ensure there is no disruption in services for participating students.

Headquartered at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the National College Advising Corps places new college graduates in underserved high schools and community colleges where they help students complete college applications and apply for financial aid. Funding supports the corps’ national training program and implementation of the near-peer mentoring model in Michigan.

The nation’s largest minority-education organization helps students to access and complete degrees at historically black colleges and universities. This two-year grant aims to increase awareness of environmentally sustainable facilities at minority-serving institutions.

UNITE-LA provides minority and low-income Los Angeles high school students with the information and assistance they need to apply for college financial aid. As a partner of the California Cash for College program, the nonprofit is using this grant money to train volunteers and to create a public campaign to increase college and financial-aid applications.

The nonprofit organization, which dates to 1867, is the American South’s only African American-led public charity working regionally on education issues affecting low-income students. This grant advances efforts to strengthen the leadership of historically black colleges and universities and to improve their success in achieving and maintaining regional accreditation.

Over the past 50 years, the national nonprofit organization has awarded nearly $2 billion to more than 2 million students through its scholarship programs and services. This grant supports the expansion of the Dreamkeepers Emergency Financial Assistance Program, which helps community college students overcome financial emergencies and stay enrolled in school.

Housed at the Rutgers University-Camden campus, the Center for Strategic Urban Community Leadership is creating a new Early Learning Research Academy to provide early childhood education for minority and low-income children in Camden, an extremely low-income and underserved community. With assistance from this planning grant, the center is formulating and implementing a capital fundraising campaign for the academy.

The district is the Pacific Northwest’s largest Head Start provider and delivers education services in 35 Seattle-area school districts. This challenge grant provides funding to construct the Greenbridge Early Learning Center, a LEED-rated demonstration site providing comprehensive child-development and family-support services to low-income residents based on the innovative Educare early childhood education model.

In addition to degree-granting programs, the college supports community outreach, public lectures, an Art Walk, and an Arts Adventures camp for low-income children. This challenge grant helps to fund the construction of a LEED-rated Drawing, Painting, and Photography Building, allowing for the expansion of studio space and the addition of degree programs in Native American Art.