Council for Opportunity in Education

Opportunity Matters Book Club

COE hosts the Opportunity Matters Book Club for first-generation and low-income students, allowing them to discuss literary works that raise issues related to opportunity and equity with their peers, TRIO alumni, and local and national leaders.

2023 BOOK CLUB SELECTION

“Finding Me: A Memoir” by Viola Davis

This year’s book selection is Finding Me, a memoir written by award-winning actress and Upward Bound alumna Viola Davis. As part of her story, she speaks about educational opportunity programs’ role in her early life. She credits the TRIO programs with shaping her aspirations and giving her “a way out” of the abject poverty of her childhood.

 

PURCHASE THE BOOK
Maura Casey

The Sisterhood: Deloris Davis Grant and Dianne Davis Wright Lead Book Club Discussion of Sister Viola Davis’s Memoir, Finding Me

May 10, 2023

Both women, throughout the conversation, marveled at what they had been through and the many achievements of the women in their family. They agreed that their mother was intrinsic to their journey.
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2022 BOOK CLUB STUDENT ESSAYS

In 2022, Deloris Davis Grant introduced an exciting feature to the year’s book club experience, a student essay challenge.

The featured book for 2022 was The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (1984). Set in Chicago in the 1970s, Cisneros explores timely and important themes of individual identity, family and community loyalty, otherness, racial and sexual oppression, and being defined by others or defining oneself. She does this through a series of vignettes that, as she has written, “add up to tell one big story, each story contributing to the whole—like beads on a necklace.”

In 2022, Deloris Davis Grant, a co-recipient of COE’s 2018 TRIO Family Achievement Award, chaired our Book Club. Grant is an English and Drama teacher at Central Falls High School – the same school where she attended Upward Bound. During our kick-off conversation, she introduced an exciting feature to this year’s book club experience, a student essay challenge. From these prompts emerged the following student essays.

READ THEM HERE

Book Club Blazes Pathways to Leadership

February 27, 2017

“Book Club” was the brainchild of Boise State Upward Bound educational specialist Josh Engler. His Upward Bound classes included many high school women in leadership positions, such as class presidents and yearbook editors who were from low-income backgrounds and might be the first in their families to go college. He was concerned that these women lacked leadership training and mentoring commensurate to their goals. Then he found himself among a handful of men attending last fall’s panel presentation “Women in Leadership: Empowering Career Growth Through Storytelling and Mentorship” at COE’s 35th Annual Conference. The panel focused on the importance of taking leadership roles and connecting with mentors about challenges and successes specific to leadership. “I left inspired and wanting to find ways to connect the young women in my program to women leaders in my community, particularly women of color,” he says.
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Terrance L. Hamm

COE Hosts Education Secretary Cardona to Facilitate 2021 Book Club Discussion with TRIO Students Nationwide

July 28, 2021

With hard work and the support of quality educators and mentors, Secretary Cardona became a first-generation college graduate and, ultimately, the youngest principal in the State of Connecticut at age 27. Moving on to earn his master’s and doctoral degrees in education, he rose to Superintendent and later State Commissioner of Education. Secretary Cardona will be this year’s program’s final national book club facilitator. Beginning in June, COE has hosted leaders in civil rights, higher education, and business to engage participating precollege and college youth in discussing the book’s myriad themes.
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ADDITIONAL OPPORTUNITIES

COE will invite applications for these additional opportunities soon.

COE has seasonal student opportunities for TRIO students and recent graduates. Get notified when COE seeks future cohorts for the opportunities below.

GET NOTIFIED

Each summer, COE hosts more than 150 TRIO high school student delegates from Upward Bound and Talent Search programs across the United States and territories to participate in a rigorous 6-day leadership experience in Washington, D.C. During the Leadership Congress, the delegates sleep, study and dine on the Georgetown University campus. In addition to meeting their Senators and Representatives on Capitol Hill, delegates engage in conflict resolution workshops, diversity training, and spend much of the program researching a critical and controversial current policy issue, drafting legislation, and then arguing their position on this question.

Beginning in the 2018-2019 academic year, a paid internship of four to six months will be awarded each year to a graduating senior or recent college graduate who has participated in a federal TRIO program. The program includes an internship in a Congressional office preceded by several weeks in COE’s Washington, DC office. The internship is named for the late Thomas R. Wolanin, former staff director of the Subcommittee on Post-Secondary Education in the U.S. House of Representatives, a champion of access and affordability in postsecondary education, and a committed advocate for first-generation students.

Increasingly, developing global competencies are a critical component of what it means to be a college graduate. Students entering the global workforce must be able to cross borders and cultures with ease. But formative experiences such as study, travel and internships abroad remain largely the province of middle- and upper-income students. The Keith Sherin Global Leaders Program was founded with the notion that all college students should have access to international experiences. The program supports the study of TRIO college students with demonstrated leadership skills in a three-to four-week program. Since 2000, more than 350 low-income, first-generation college students and students with disabilities have participated in COE-sponsored short-term and semester study abroad programs in Great Britain, Mexico, the Netherlands, South Africa and Spain.

Through the Keith Sherin Global Leaders Washington Semester Program, one high-achieving TRIO college student is selected each semester and supported with tuition, housing and a small living stipend. The Washington, D.C. public policy program includes a semester of study at Marquette University’s Les Aspin Center and an internship placement in a Congressional office. The program recruits students with strong academic records who can juggle a full course load on top of a three-day-per-week job. Interns see public policy in the making and gain valuable work skills and connections.

The pitch competition offers students an opportunity to develop a brief competitive presentation to propose their business ideas to an audience and a panel of judges. Contestants will have an opportunity to win up to $2,500 in scholarships and prizes. The virtual pitch competition is exclusively for active TRIO participants.

Get in Touch

Questions? Contact Director of Student Development Services Angela L. Holley via email at [email protected].

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