Past Stories
Clearing the road to sustainable community development
Only 15 miles separate UMass Amherst from the streets of south Holyoke, but to the young people of Holyoke’s Latino community, the road between the two communities can seem long, the obstacles daunting and the directions unclear.
Over 70-percent of the children of Holyoke’s Latino neighborhoods are growing up in poverty, and 30-percent of the city residents 18 years of age or older lack a high school diploma. For many, college simply doesn’t seem like an option.
The Pathways to College program—part of a far-reaching partnership in which UMass Amherst Outreach is pleased to be taking a leadership role through UMass Extension and the Massachusetts 4-H program—is helping to make the trip a little more accessible by allowing students from Holyoke to tour the campuses of the Five College area and to interact with older college students.
Pathways is part of larger initiative that is also giving UMass Amherst graduate students an opportunity to apply their research to the concrete needs of Holyoke residents and to the economic development of the city.
Jen Cannon and Agustin Lao-Montes
of the UMass Amherst Department of Sociology
In both respects, creating a direct link between UMass Amherst and the City of Holyoke is an experience that can change minds, shift plans and alter the landscape of future possibilities, according to Imre Kepes, co-director of El Arco Iris, a youth program for the community development agency Nueva Esperanza, Inc.
“Many of our young people have hardly been out of Holyoke, so just leaving the neighborhood is scary,” said Kepes. “We want young people to experience what a college campus is like and to get comfortable with it. They go on tours, go to class, look at dorms, and get pumped up.”
Pathways is being run in Holyoke public schools as part of an after-school program for middle school students. It is just one component of the Holyoke Planning Network Community Outreach Partnerships Center(HPN/COPC), a three-year $400,000 initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The COPC program is a new kind of community-driven approach to sustainable economic development. It has brought together Holyoke city government, community advocacy groups, and area colleges to address tough and longstanding urban problems, in part by calling on the combined resources of the UMass Amherst colleges of Natural Resources and the Environment (NRE), Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS), Humanities and Fine Arts and the schools of Public Health and Health Sciences (SPHHS), and Education.
The program includes research and outreach activities in four major focus areas: education, economic development and community planning, capacity building, and fair housing and lending.
“South Holyoke is one of most economically challenged [neighborhoods] in whole state,” notes Agustin Lao-Montes of the UMass Amherst Department of Sociology. Working in Holyoke has given his graduate students a new take on the needs of the city’s people and on the relationship between the university and the community. Lao-Montes and his students, along with UMass Amherst architecture students, are focusing on issues ranging from job creation to community design.
“We look at the issues people are facing and what can be done about them,” he said.
As part of the education component of the COPC program, Pathways to College targets 12 to 14 year-olds, encouraging them to begin planning college as a part of their future. With the help of students and staff from local colleges including UMass Amherst, the middle school students participate in a series of field trips to the different campuses, where they are given a taste of college life by college students themselves.
The program includes components like resume writing and personal skill development. Depending on student interest, the program also hosts career fairs featuring Hispanic speakers from different fields of work.
“We like to look for people with backgrounds similar to [the students’],” said Kepes. “We want them to know what the process is and how to handle it with confidence.”
“Our middle school students have very high aspirations,” she continued. “Some want to become lawyers, doctors, businesspeople, and policeman. Some are more trade-oriented and want to work on cars. Whatever their dream is at the time, we want to support them and have them connect their dreams with getting a good education.”
