I just stumbled across this essay by J. B. Schramm of College Summit. College Summit is a non-profit that looks to help lower income kids — specifically the ones who aren’t the straight A kids — into college. Mr. Schramm seems like a pretty amazing guy… he’s a Yale and Harvard Divinity grad who went to work in Washington, DC at a local ministry and then found a problem — too many urban kids who could go to college don’t. I’ve seen it here in NYC as well — where middle class kids with Cs find the schools that will accept them, many of the poorer kids don’t. Beacon is an exception because of the outstanding work of Stephanie Binder and the advisors who care about the kids.

I saw it acutely in the basketball world where kids who were solid players and decent students didn’t go on because… well… for any number of reasons. I’ve tried working with college coaches to get more of them to recruit in the city, because I really think that there are so many amazing kids who could excel scholastically and athletically at Div II and Div III schools. But, and it’s not hard to understand why this happens, it’s easier for the college coaches — and college admissions offices — to find similar kids in the more affluent areas of our society where the apparatus is in place to support those kids.

And that’s my small window into that world. I know at Beacon, we’ve sent dozens of kids off to college who were the first in their families to go to school. We’ve had so many kids who never thought they could leave New York City for school go off and have great success. And it sounds like we do it with a very similar approach to College Summit. It’s something to replicate at SLA… and something we want to build in when those first kids are 9th graders.

But… go read the essay. It’s from a chapter of a book called How to Change the World. It’s a wonderful reminder of how a small effort can steamroll into something much larger. As my good friend Nate Turner has posted on the outside of his classroom door:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

— Margaret Mead