Studer Community Institute

Take Stock scholarship is a real deal

January 30, 2015
/ Reggie Dogan
/ education

College and career readiness are important steps toward ending poverty through education. Building career-based opportunities for at-risk, low-income is a top priority for Take Stock in Children. “Career fields are a priority, and for me, that's what I want this organization to move forward,” said Madeline Pumariega, Take Stock in Children’s president and CEO. “Then we can create some meaningful, early work exposure for our students.” Pumariega stopped in Pensacola this week as she made her rounds in Northwest Florida. as part of National Mentoring Month, celebrating 14 years of spreading mentoring awareness in an effort to connect more young people with quality mentors. Take Stock in Children is a statewide nonprofit organization that has helped more than 22,000 low-income and at-risk youth to break the cycle of poverty by finishing college. In Escambia County, 110 mentors volunteer to mentor to 118 students. As president, Pumariega leads the charge of the organization, which now serves some 8,000 low-income and at-risk middle and high school students each year, as well as about 6,000 students in colleges across the state. She oversees the organization’s management and operations, fundraising and development efforts, as well as strategic partnerships and legislative affairs. Pumariega believes that building stronger partnerships with businesses and getting more students interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields will help enhance career readiness for Take Stock students. She would like to see more students paired with students in a STEM-related field. “So many of the stories I hear from our students are that they’re in a STEM field because they had a mentor in that STEM field,” Pumariega said. “They took them to work one day or got to see that mentor in action and said, ‘Why not me?’ and they ended up in that path.” School-based mentoring primarily is one-on-one, with an adult spending about an hour a week with a student. Statistics bear out that the program continues to exceed its goals and ably meets it objectives. According to Take Stock in Children data:

The students involved in Take Stock have a 21 percent higher graduation rate than Florida's average and 65 percent higher rate than their low-income peer group.
The college enrollment rate is 55 percent higher than Florida's average and it is 229 percent higher than those in their peer group.
The college graduation rate is 23 percent higher than Florida's average and is 136 percent higher than their peer group.

Pumariega envisions a model in which a mentor could meet with a group of students, sharing his or her life experience, talents and skills with several young people, instead of one. “Imagine coming into a school and potentially mentoring a group of students who are interesting in a certain field and being able to do college readiness workshops for a whole group of ninth-graders,” she said. “One way out of poverty is education, and a strong pathway is with a caring adult. That requires investing and working together to show that this scholarship is important; it is not a dream, it’s real.”

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Take Stock scholarship is a real deal

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