Nomar Leonardo Melo Cabral was weeks into his first semester in college when an unexpected bill from New York’s Stony Brook University arrived in his inbox.
Nomar, 19, is the first in his family to attend college in the United States, and he was tempted to panic. Instead, he called upon a resource many young people in his position don’t have: an advocate from OneGoal New York, a mentorship program that has been working with him since high school. “I was thinking, ‘I have a bill; it’s all over,’” Nomar recalled. An adviser from OneGoal helped him resolve the issue with the college so he could focus again on his classes. “I realized, ‘I have someone to help me,’” he said.
Nomar is one of 15,000 students across the country enrolled in OneGoal, a Chicago-based nonprofit group that helps students from low-income backgrounds prepare for college and navigate an admissions process that is stressful for even the wealthiest families in the United States.
After the Supreme Court’s decision last year to ban affirmative action, OneGoal is an especially timely and vital balm. The vast majority of OneGoal students are eligible for free or reduced lunch; 94% identify as a member of a racial minority group. Americans who are committed to fairness and equity and who want to help such students will have to find creative ways of doing so.
That’s one reason The New York Times Community Fund supports OneGoal.
The OneGoal program begins in the junior year of high school. Students form a cohort within their existing high school and together receive intensive college advising, from help with personal essays to the Byzantine process of applying for financial aid. OneGoal also tries to build the confidence of its students, who often attend overburdened schools.
“They were busy with a bunch of other kids,” Nomar told me of the guidance counselors at his high school, in the Williamsburg neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough of New York City. Nomar said he was able to use what he learned to help classmates who weren’t in the program apply for college. And he said OneGoal provided critical help in applying for financial aid, a process his parents were struggling to navigate. “They didn’t understand financial aid or how the loan system worked,” he said of his parents. “I had to help them understand it.”
Given the enormous barriers to attending college, it’s not surprising that nearly 90% of students from wealthy families do so, while only half of students from low-income families do. OneGoal is aimed at closing this gap. Giving students from low-income families a fighting chance to attend college is a matter of fairness. But it’s also a way to strengthen the middle class, which is essential to American democracy.
Since 2007, over 30,000 students have been directly served by OneGoal, and tens of thousands more have been helped through local school districts that have adopted the program. With your support, this worthy nonprofit can do even more.
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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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