The movement began with a field trip on a yellow school bus, filed with 30 foster children from Harlem.
In 1991, Manhattan Beach resident Leanne Huebner, at 22, was a fresh college grad out of UPenn living in NYC, working on Wall Street and spending her free time with foster youth. That July, she and her colleague, Dan Moretti, organized a fieldtrip to Choate Rosemary Hall, a prestigious boarding school in Connecticut and Moretti’s alma mater. They wanted to inspire the children, to help them aspire.
At the end of the trip, the pair asked the kids: “Who wants to apply to boarding school for the following summer?”
Six hands went up. So the pair got to work.
“We thought, we don’t have a lot of time, but the time we have, we want to make sure it’s high impact,” Huebner recalled. As fresh inductees to their Wall Street careers, she and many of her friends, the first class of volunteers, were working long hours at their bosses’ disposal. So to ensure uninterrupted support for the kids, they assigned a team of three – two mentors and a team leader – to each student. Kind of like parents, so they could go back and forth, Huebner suggested.
Soon, Minds Matter NYC’s inaugural class and its mentors were gathering inside the JP Morgan cafeteria for four hours every Saturday morning, honing SAT skills while working on applications to competitive summer programs.
More than 20 years later, this model is still intact – and it’s proven successful, to say the least. One of the program’s first graduates went onto Yale to earn his Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry and is now a professor. Another earned her J.D./M.B.A. from Duke and is a children’s book author.
Ten chapters nationwide now serve more than 500 low-income students across New York, Boston, Cleveland, Denver, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, Twin Cities, and since 2010, Los Angeles. Minds Matter has graduated more than 750 alumni, many of whom have proceeded onto the nation’s top universities and programs. Minds Matter continues to be driven by the passion of volunteers – 1,200 of them to be exact – whose professions range from finance to academics to entertainment.
“It’s amazing,” Huebner said, laughing. “That’s what makes it so powerful to me. As soon as we started telling people what we were doing, it was like, everybody wanted to do it.”
The program boasts quite a track record: Since 1991, 100 percent of Minds Matter students have attended a four-year college or university, with 90 percent obtaining their degree within four years.
Minds Matter aims to level the playing field for high-potential students from low-income families. (Average incoming GPA is 3.7, average family income $25,000.) The three-year program, beginning at the high school sophomore level, provides a rigorous curriculum that develops students’ critical thinking, reading and writing skills. Meanwhile, mentors walk their mentees through the application process for pre-college summer programs, and for juniors, four-year colleges and universities. As a nonprofit, Minds Matter covers their students’ costs through donations and fundraisers.
“We handpick these students for a reason,” said Taber Gonzales, co-founder of the Los Angeles chapter and director of volunteer recruiting. “A lot of kids that are in the right direction get set adrift … our program is intent to help those kids who show initiative not get lost in the crowd. They’re the exceptions.”
The Los Angeles chapter, which meets every Saturday at the USC Department of Education offices in downtown, will graduate its first class this month. Among the 12 seniors is Toshe, a 17-year-old student at King-Drew Medical Magnet High School in Carson. As immigrants from Nigeria, she and her family were initially perplexed by the American education and college system, she said. But come this fall, she will most likely attend UC Berkeley as a political science major.
“I always knew I wanted to go to college, but it was just a matter of how to get there, to get the results I want,” Toshe said. “So my mentors have been an instrumental part of that whole process and helping me understand.”
Students from low-income families, often first-generation immigrants, commonly have limited access to resources. According to the National Association for College Admission Counseling, only 6 percent of high school students from families with income below $25,000 will achieve a four-year college degree. Many of these students, with little to no assistance from parents and overbooked school counselors, find it daunting to navigate the college and financial aid application process by themselves.
Brandon, a 17-year-old junior at Verbun Dei High School in Watts, was on that boat until he found Minds Matter two years ago.
“I already had the grades that would set me up for a better future than others,” he said. “But there was some stuff that I was still wary about, with college.”
Brandon, born and raised in South Central, was in the seventh grade when his brother dropped out of college. He said he remembers thinking, “Maybe college is really hard and I don’t meet those expectations.” But his mother, who supports the entire family working as a clerk at Rite Aid, urged him to not follow that path.
Last summer, Brandon enrolled in a pre-college program at George Washington University, taking a course in crime and justice. This summer, he is Harvard-bound. He will be taking two courses: Introduction to American Government and Advanced Essay Writing.
“When you hear stories like that, it’s pretty amazing to see what potential can become if it’s nurtured in the right way,” Gonzales said. “You break the cycle of adversity that a lot of these come from.”
Huebner, one of two Manhattan Beach residents to receive the 2013 Woman of Distinction Award from Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, is no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of her founding chapter, Minds Matter NYC. Now as a founding board vice president of the LA chapter, she’s working hard to fund the pre-college summer programs her students will soon embark on.
“If you can inspire or teach a kid how to become resilient, that’s all that matters,” Huebner said. “The students we choose are so driven. We open the door for them and they go through.”
On Thursday, May 9, Minds Matter LA and Learning Rights Law Center will host “A Taste for Education,” a special wine tasting fundraiser at Barsha Tasting Room in Manhattan Beach from 6 to 9 p.m. Tickets are $80, available here.
