In December 2024, Believe in Students celebrated a significant milestone as our founding Board Chair, Richard Binswanger, stepped down from his position. The following resolution, presented by our incoming Board Chair, Jesse Thompson, expresses our profound gratitude...

Believe in Students was founded in 2016, at the dawn of the first Trump administration. After years of changing higher education finances, the burden on students had become so great that studies regularly showed that more than half of all college students struggled...

I arrived at Believe in Students in April 2020, just as the pandemic was rocking the world and changing college campuses, in some ways permanently. My job when I arrived was to figure out how to utilize incredibly generous philanthropic support to provide emergency...

I was a young child when Black History Month came to national consciousness. I remember my dad using the opportunity to teach me, barely in school, about the history of Black achievement and leadership in this country. As an Iowan, I learned about George Washington...

There are many aspects of Black History Month that I hold close to my heart. However, a couple stand out, especially as I reflect on how often I am the only Black person in many of the professional spaces I occupy. First, I am profoundly moved by the purposeful,...

Although I concede that everyone’s life is unique, those who know me well would agree that my upbringing was a little extraordinary. I belong to an average middle class family, the mother of which was a nurse at the local hospital, the father of which was a...

Dearest Professors, I am writing the following letter to you because I owe you the gift of communicated knowledge.You have been gracious, understanding, ingenious, and inventive in a time of great uncertainty and upheaval. You have done your very best to pivot, adapt,...

During the month of June 2018, I enrolled as a student at Mt. Hood Community College. I was filled with great excitement and ambition of the new opportunity. Yet, I was also overcome with fear and anxiety as I had been a 15-year-old first-generation college student...

They say it takes a village to raise a child. Well, Delaware County Community College has been the village that turned this man into a graduate.

I would wait until the evening, when it was pleasantly cool and dark enough, to slip unnoticed into the other dorms and make my way to recycling stations on each floor. I’d gather the glass bottles in a big garbage bag pilfered from my own dorm’s kitchen, and when I got all I could carry, I would start toward the grocery store a block off campus, the bag bumping along behind me, clink-clink-clinkety-clink.

In February 2020, the novel coronavirus began making its way into the US, creating one of the most dramatic and widespread emergencies of my lifetime.

So much has happened since I’ve started here at ODU which is why it is important that I share as much of my experience with you for you to understand how my college experience is in no way like the traditional ones you see.