AUSTIN, Texas — The Texas Education Consortium for Male Students of Color, a program AUSTIN, Texas — in the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement at UT Austin, has been awarded a $375,000 grant from the Kresge Foundation to support its efforts in helping low-income African American and Latinx males enter the college pipeline.
Since its inception in 2013, the Consortium has built a statewide network of educators who are working together to help male students of color prepare for success in high school and college. With the Kresge grant, the program aims to build upon its partnerships and educational offerings, including its Texas Male Student Leadership Summit, an annual conference held each semester at UT Austin that brings together hundreds of students, educators and higher education professionals from across Texas and the nation.
The grant will also allow for the Consortium to build upon its evidence-based intervention strategies and practices that are offered to K-12 and higher education institutions. Designed and developed by Consortium partner institutions (school districts, community colleges and four-year universities), these offerings include research and best practices for better serving K-12 and college students, mentoring services, and a summer leadership academy for local middle- and high-school students.
Emmet Campos, director of Project MALES, said the grant will help the Consortium continue its mission to increase the number of African American and Latinx college graduates across the state of Texas. The Consortium is a unit within Project MALES (Mentoring to Achieve Latino Educational Success) which also includes the Project MALES Mentoring Program and a Research Institute.
“This grant will support the our efforts at Project MALES and the Texas Education Consortium to continue to build the capacity of our Consortium partners individually and collectively, using evidence-based practices that have been tested in the field with our Consortium partners to better serve boys and young men of color,” Campos says.
This is the Consortium’s second grant awarded by The Kresge Foundation, which works to expand opportunities in America’s cities through grantmaking and social investing in arts and culture, education, environment, health, human services and community development in Detroit, Michigan.
