Culture & Community | Education & Youth | Education
When Aleisha Luna started looking at colleges, she didn’t know where to start. For years, her parents had been supportive of her academic career, urging her to “seek horizons beyond anything I could actually see around me.” But when the New Haven student began her search for higher education, it was uncharted territory.
Luna, like many of her classmates, is a first-generation college student. And she needed help.
Now, Luna is one of the founding members of the College Bound BIPOC Students Alliance (CBBSA), an organization that helps BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) students find free college advisory resources. These include academic enrichment programs, free SAT test prep, boot camps and academic tutoring, college essay and college supplements support, internships, fellowships, mentorships and entrepreneurship programs.
“CBBSA recognized my ambitions and provided a tremendous amount of guidance to me,” said Luna, a junior at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, during an interview with CBBSA leaders Jonas and Tristan Ward (who are in full disclosure this reporter’s brothers). “Not only did they further my desire to attend college, but they eased all of the growing doubts and struggles I was facing with the search for financial aid, scholarships, and grants.”
It comes at a time of transition for the program. In 2021, CBBSA organized and led student panel college information sessions at St. Martin de Porres Academy and Horizons at Foote School. Then earlier this year, the group collaborated with Katherine Viera, former Co-Chair of Yale Latino Networking Group, to co-host a series of virtual college information workshops.
But something wasn't working exactly as the founders wanted it to. In 2023, the Ward brothers decided to pivot from CBBSA’s initial direction and build a cadre of student leaders. A long term project required an influx of college bound students, both to provide peer mentoring and developing their own leadership skills.
The plan was for these students to become youth leaders themselves, both in their schools and within their home communities. Enter CBBSA Leaders-In-Training program, the initial cohort of which has six members.
“This placement component has now become a fundamental part of CBBSA’s mission,” Jonas said. “ We seek leadership positions in organizations that provide services to the youth in the New Haven area and ensure that youth leaders are seated at the decision making table where they are seen, heard, valued and respected.”
In addition to placing students in positions of leadership in local organizations, CBBSA also works to find free opportunities for personal and professional growth of their members. For instance, New Haven Academy senior Angelo Sevilla discovered the city’s Youth Services Commission, and learned about a three-week summer program at New York University. It opened new academic doors for them.
“[I]was able to receive a recommendation letter from a professor there,” Sevilla recalled. “ I also learned about college fly-in programs, and was accepted to the fly-in program at Wesleyan University.”
“Right now I am an ambassador and member of Hemispheres, a club for high school students run by the Yale International Relations Association,” said Aqueelah Irshad, a senior at James Hillhouse High School. “Through that, I was selected to attend Yale Model United Nations Europe (YMUNE), an international Model UN conference in Belgium.”
Irshad also volunteers at New Haven Reads, a local non-profit that assists students who are reading below grade-level.
The CBBSA team has also been making an effort to connect their members with SAT preparatory programs. That was welcome news to Yael Cervantes-Nava and Luna, both of whom recently found themselves in the thick of college application season. When they looked for guidance, CBBSA directed them to Higher Heights and Urban Improvement Corporation, and utilized Schoolhouse and Yale Education Tutoring Initiative (YETI) for SAT prep and tutoring resources.
“As a college-bound BIPOC student, I knew that it was ultimately up to me to search out an appropriate path to higher education,” Luna said. She said this was a daunting task coming from “a background within a disadvantaged community and with low expectations concerning higher education.” She highlighted how this task was more difficult while attending a high school that does not focus on college preparation.
The students not only saw a shift in what was possible for college, but also said they each saw areas of personal growth and learning within themselves and as a team. Irshad, a gap year student who relocated to New Haven after graduating from high school in Florida, noted that she has changed over these past eight months.
“I have always been a shy person, but with CBBSA, I have learned to get out of my shell and work with others towards a common goal,” she said. “ I am also learning that my voice should always be heard and that I need to be seen, valued and respected wherever I go.”
Azaad Mamoon, a senior at New Haven Academy, followed up on the importance of sharing a common goal with his team members. “It is gratifying to see the others around me develop just as much," he said. "When we aid other team members in their victories, the feeling is shared between all of us."
Although most of the leaders-in-training have already submitted their college applications for this year, they are not losing any steam. According to Jonas Ward, CBBSA plans to deliver college preparation information sessions this upcoming spring, and they “will be a community collaboration with some of the organizations that supported us in the past.”
College-bound students in grades six through 12 (and their parents/guardians) and all gap year students can email cbbsainfo@gmail.com to be notified as soon as the dates, times and locations of sessions or other events are released. This piece first appeared in print in the Inner-City News, a partner publication of the Arts Paper, and has been edited for clarity.