 to introduce to you Student Bridges Agency from the University of Massachusetts. And this is who they are. And my name is Jadali Suisse, and I am the Interim Director for Student Bridges and also the course instructor. You'll learn a little bit more about what that means in a little bit. But at first, just so that it's a, it's, we're here for just a little bit. And we're going to introduce Student Bridges and how Student Bridges does their community engagement work. Also how Student Bridges situates itself here on campus. And also how we through engagement in classroom also engage ourselves as tutor mentors in our community schools. So we are right now doing tutor mentoring in Holyoke in Springfield and in Amherst and looking forward to doing much more. But I would like to take some time to have Student Bridges talk about the work that they do because they are an incredible, we are, I'm part of the organization, we are an incredible organization. One of the most special things about Student Bridges is that it is student initiated. It was initiated in 2005. And also it is student led. I provide advice as a faculty advisor, as a programmatic administrator and advisor and mentor. And I teach the courses, but it literally is a collaborative. And I am just humbled every day with how much work these students do. And it is my aim to literally communicate and bear witness to the amazing work that they do. And so I might just a little bit about me. I am just, I'm actually just submitted my dissertation, but I still need to defend. So I still need to defend. But I am a first generation student as well. And I'm Puerto Rican, I was born in Puerto Rico. I did not think that I could go to college for various obvious reasons that reasons why our mission is what it is. But literally my motivation to go into higher ed was motivation to try to fight for access and into bridging opportunity. So working with Student Bridges, now that I have earned a bachelor's, earned a master's and earning a PhD as a Puerto Rican, I really want to focus on representation. And working with Student Bridges literally is like a dream come true. So here I am and I'm really excited to be mentored by Joseph and to be working at the like heels of Maddie. She was there as the first faculty advisor for Student Bridges. And Beth, who has been an incredible mentor for me when I also worked at Student Bridges when I just started my graduate work. So it's been a really interesting time and working in the communities in Holyoke and I've just met so many people and sitting back there and hearing so many people talk about their experiences and their commitment to the communities, my communities. It's just really emotional. And so I'm gonna see lots of you probably tomorrow at Holyoke Bound and then the following week in Springfield Bound. So it's just interesting that even through higher education although at times I have felt isolated and marginalized as well, I have found a space that is supportive of me and celebrates me. And so here I am and I'm just gonna turn it over to Marvin's who is our undergraduate program coordinator. And then I will have Hadi who is a recruitment coordinator and Amy Stose who is our graduate program coordinator to introduce themselves and share with you how they got to the work that they're doing now. Thank you so much for having us today. Hello everyone. Can you hear me? Yes. Hi, as Dali said, my name is Marvin's. I am the undergraduate program coordinator for the Student Bridges Agency here on the UMass Amherst campus. I truly am in love with Student Bridges. I've been working with Student Bridges ever since my freshman year, ever since I enrolled here on this campus. I'm currently a junior now and Student Bridges has totally changed my perspective on how I view this world. I came in as a Silver Engineering major and it has, once I joined the organizations, it turned my mind to becoming a Stepic and Anthropology major. And I also, thank you. And I also work within, I'm currently doing the CSOL certificate. I'm finishing up this semester. I have one more public policy class to take and then I'll be done with that credential. But yeah, I've been working with Student Bridges on a variety of different aspects. I started off as a tutor mentor and a student in the course that's taught by the agency. So I was able to go into our partner sites that are hosted in Springfield, Commerce High, Amherst Regional Schools. There's also Holyoke, which I did not get to experience, but I hope to be in contact as my new position as undergraduate program coordinator. And also last year, I served as the public relations coordinator where I helped do more outreach for the organization, get our name out there, get people knowing about the organization because it's one thing to do the work, but if no one knows who you are or that you are doing it, then it becomes, that's where an issue comes, I'm gonna rise. So that's where I kind of took my role, become PR, and then I got really engaged and involved with the organization. And then that's why I'm here today. Working very closely with our core team, the Dali's interim director, Amy, our graduate program coordinator. And there's also another person like me, her name's Ayan Ferris. She's also an undergraduate program coordinator and we all work closely in the overall functions and sustainability of our agency. And I'll let these two introduce themselves and then I'll talk a little bit more about what Stern Bridges is and what exactly that we do and then about our mission statement. Hi, everybody. So my name's Hattie Sanchez and I am the recruitment coordinator for Student Bridges this year. I'm Dominican. I'm from Western Massachusetts and I got involved with Student Bridges last year taking the class. It was just a thing. I was like, let me take this class. It seemed cool. And I fell in love with Jadalis and I fell in love with the work we do. I went as a tutor mentor to Commerce High School in Springfield. I was working with the Upward Bound program there and I decided that I love the students and I wanted to continue to work with them. So then over the summer, I worked as a mentor for the Upward Bound summer program here at UMass. So I lived with the students, got to know them, mentored more. And then I applied to Student Bridges to be a recruitment coordinator so I can continue doing the work that we do and continue to build that relationship with the students and to put our name out there. Hey, can you hear me in the back? Cool, my name is Amy Stokes. As they said, I am the graduate program coordinator for Student Bridges. I just joined the team last spring. I'm in my second year of the master's degree for the School of Public Policy and I'm really excited to just be in Massachusetts and be a part of the public policy program and to be a part of Student Bridges. I am from a very small town in Tennessee and so coming to Massachusetts was a huge transition for me but I always say that Student Bridges was honestly a godsend to me. I just found a group of people that really took me in with open arms and welcomed me in my experiences that I bring with me. I worked for a non-profit for two years called Tennessee Achieves and they partnered with the state government of Tennessee to facilitate a free community college program. Some people don't know that Tennessee has free community college which is honestly a miracle. So I bring those experiences with me and have been able to use all the different skills that I've learned through my bachelor's degree as a business major and through working with different non-profits over the course of my academic life and then my professional life. And I've really enjoyed being a part of Student Bridges. I'm really excited to be here with you all today and I just love talking about this program. It's when those of you that know DaDallas she's the real deal and that makes Student Bridges the real deal as well but also the students that are a part of our staff are committed and driven and creative and amazing. And I don't say that because it's something I'm supposed to say. I say that because I genuinely mean it and I think those of you that work in the community and work with students know how meaningful student work can be. And I always think about the experiences that students have on this campus and how much learning goes on through service work and through volunteer work and the experiences that our students are having that I'm having as well going out into the communities getting to know the communities and becoming a part of the community rather than us going into the community and saying what you need to do we learn from the communities themselves. And DaDallas and Marvin's we'll talk more about that in a minute but I'm just super if you can't tell, I'm super excited to be here and be a part of this conversation and I look forward to meeting all of you. Also another thing that is important to note we do have 12 other undergraduate students that are not here today but they do work within the agency and of our staff, our staff itself is representative also of the communities that we serve. We have people on the staff from varying genders, race, sexualities, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm really awesome to be working with our new staff this year. We just hired a complete new team as DaDallas said there's only two returners which is me and Ion and people who are coming on the staff this year they're bursting with ideas. So just watch out for us on campus as there's gonna be more of student bridges you're gonna be hearing our names more often I'm here now. So yeah, what I like to say about student bridges it's not just like one like static narrow thing there's so many like different moving parts within our agency. We do a lot of things from advocacy work. We do community engagement. We partner with other schools, other organizations on campus and to encompass all that we have our mission statement which is to increase college access and success for underrepresented students on the university campus and in our neighboring communities by building partnerships at UMass with local schools, community organizations and offering college awareness, preparation, success activities and advocating for enhanced institutional public policies and practices. So here at Student Bridges we recognize there are some issues and barriers. So from like birth to college graduation there's some numerous obstacles that confront many low income first generation underrepresented students, students of color from who hope to gain or have access to a college degree. And these are issues on like a college affordability issues of academic preparation from when they are in high school or it also wants to get into college preparing them to get to the end of college. That's also an issue that we have to recognize issues of social capital, parental support and also issues of like transportation or childcare for like non-traditional students. So these are all issues and barriers that do affect and impact our underrepresented students who hope to obtain higher education, higher educational degree and at Student Bridges we recognize that and then we have different programming, different initiatives that we'd like to initiate here on the UMass Amherst campus and hopefully expand outside of that and offer our model to other organizations who are hoping to do some similar work on other college universities or in like their local communities. So exactly about what we do at Student Bridges we realize that we are also a small organization so we can't, in reality we can't do everything. But these barriers cannot be resolved with us alone so we must enhance and expand programs and policies and partnerships that support college affordability and access at the federal, state and university level. So by partnering with other organizations with the same sort of like intent, sort of kind of similar missions on how we could get more access and more access to education for our underrepresented populations here on our campus and our surrounding communities. So we do this as I said before through a number of different advocacy initiatives, a retention programming and community engagement opportunities. So we have different programs within the agency. We actually just yesterday launched our ambassador program which we just recruited about 27 students. Yeah, 27 students extra from outside of our course. We have a full course of two of the mentors going to our Holyoke and our Amherst sites but we also have a new group of students that are also going to be going to our Springfield Commerce sites. So we have, this is probably one of our largest groups yet of two of the mentors going out to our community partner site. So if you want to say it again. So probably because we're not going to have a lot of time to do like probably the small workshops. I just want to interject here. This is just a few of the programs that Student Bridges has but the ambassador program was for transparency. I'm in Turram for a reason. It's the first, this is one of the initiatives is to assign a professional staff that could also teach and hold those roles together to provide advice for Student Bridges and become a liaison between the university. Just like policy administration and the students. It's a lot of burden on students sometimes just to also do programming and then to manage that. So this is the first year I'm in Turram in that process of staying. I want to say I'm staying. But it's this year infrastructure changes were focused last year and this year it's more about implementation. And so Ambassador Perlman was one of the things that the students staff really wanted to bring back. And so not every student can take and be a part of the class because of scheduling, right? I mean, it's just hard. And there's just one class, just one instructor. And then it limits who you get to go into the community and the community is not when we want to go to the communities, where the community has the need and the space and the vacancy for us to come in and engage. And so it's hard from semester to semester or year to year to have that conversation of capacity. And so Ambassador Program is an incredible opportunity to recruit and create another sustainable way of developing trained tutor mentors who are engaged in reflexivity, engaged in reflection and in the frameworks of sustainable, culturally sustaining and appropriate civic and community engagement. And but people that probably have more space in their schedule or different type of space in their schedule and who don't have to engage in a three hour and a half lecture class but can earn instead of four credits, two credits and engage in a shorter practicum base. And so this year with me being on staff, we decided let's do that in response to one of our sites. So this year, one of our oldest sites and partners, we couldn't have the tutor mentors. We didn't find students in the class who had the Monday and Wednesdays. And the commitment is a lot. Going to commerce high school, it requires that a student commits himself for a year, both semesters, to go every week Mondays and Wednesdays, leave campus at 1.30 and get to campus back at five to do tutor mentoring in Springfield. It takes a long time to get to Springfield. And so this year the schedule was limiting and I was able to place students in other sites but commerce didn't have it. So we came back and we had very long conversations that we need to do something about this and we're talking about the ambassador, can we make it happen in a week? And so I mean, Joseph has been in these conversations at 9.30 at night, we're having a conversation about can we do this? And we did and student bridges really got together and we had already collected a lot of interest and a whole like over this last three weeks, like 150 students who wanted to be involved in student bridges. And so we blasted an invitation and yesterday we didn't know who was gonna show up but they were all there. We had like 30, almost 40 students there and we were able to staff commerce with their tutor mentors for this year. So I'm really, really excited about that. And it was an effort, it was an incredible effort with a brand new staff. But our ambassador program, now we have two groups, one that's going to the tutor mentoring and one that now is just community engagement tutor mentors that now we can place in other spaces. And so we're super excited about that. And so we can share a little bit more of student bridges but I wanna engage you too because one, the topic of our presentation is youth centered and asset based. And that is one of the, our approach is to be youth centered. Our youth and our communities are engaging with our undergraduate students through sharing of similar experiences to bridging no pun intended student bridges but to literally bridging those students into this campus even when they're younger with culturally sustaining and responsive tours. So I'm just gonna hand it back to Marvin's because what the organization does here is with that in mind. With that in mind, the students who are not here yet who possibly continue to feel marginalized if they get into the university because they are underrepresented, marginalized, minoritized, they are, come from under resourced spaces and so on. Just like Marvin's talked about, they are confronting barriers and it's a different space. Maybe in their spaces somebody has told them like they didn't need. You know, you're not college material, believing in the deficit perspective, believing in that. Our work really works with teaching and engaging the youth in these conversations. Be aware of the systematic oppression that's happening and how it impacts you. But how do you create a counter story? How do you navigate? How do you use your cultural community wealth? How do you do that? And student bridges are prepared students who come from very similar backgrounds and who are motivated and just activists that are going to help them navigate through this university. And if they're not there, we have college access program. We join other college access programs and we bring our narratives into the space and we engage them. So I just want you to have that as the base or the framework to understand how Marvin's is explaining what student bridges does. Yes, so, and then on the others, if you continue down the list, we have a bunch of other programs that we offer in our agency. Please note at the bottom says more to come. We have plenty more programs coming. And then in like the next few seconds, I'm just gonna be showing some visuals of like different initiatives and different programming that we have done. So this is actually a group of students at our, at the upper bound site that we have two mentors at. We do a biannual event called I'm So College, which in that event, we promote, we have different workshops, different performances, food. And within these programming initiatives, we give them workshops that, you know, on like financial aid on like tips on how to get a college, writing a college essay, things like that, to like better help them prepare for college for to kind of like help them with like that, like that whole that's like left that they don't get in their original schools that they don't get at home. And we provide transportation for them. We collect resources together to make it possible for them to attend these events. Or if for some reason, they're not going to be able to attend their events, then we come to them. Because, you know, like as one of the issues and bears as I listed earlier, transportation is one big part of them. And like, you know, the issue of affordability of taking transportation or like the access to transportation, that is a big thing. And then if that is not possible, then we bring ourselves to them, just still give them, you know, the resources and the opportunities that they deserve. And then this is actually our former staff from last year. I helped serve on that staff and this is like a visual of them. So a picture that was taken a few years ago at a protest that we helped organize with the BSC organization in response to some of the racist incidents that have happened on campus. So we do, in terms of advocacy work and activist work, that's also another platform that we do hold here on our campus. Again, at our partner sites, at Upward Bound, some of our tutor mentors, you know, doing different programming and different workshops with the students on, you know, expressing their creativity, allowing them to like tap into their inner selves, their inner expression on how to, on how they just like want to generally express themselves because like, Dadaus is going to demonstrate later. You know, you don't want to take that away from them. Like, you know, let them express themselves, let them be who they are, because they all come with different identities. And you don't want to take a single part of that away from them. Some of our events that we keep doing throughout the year, this actually, Dadaus, at one of our partner sites in Holyoke, and again, another last picture of our former staff that we had last year. And then, oh yeah, these were our staff retreats. So again, on what we're talking about, we really do appreciate and emphasize staff collaboration and bonding and making sure that we're supporting one another. And we do make sure that we do, within our agency, support one another because if we don't support one another within the organization, how do you expect to support other students as well, right? So that is very an important thing to consider when you are organizing within other, within your respective organizations, make sure that everyone within that organization is on the same page. Everyone respects one another. Everyone is helping each other out. And we have a clear goal. And then, finally, it's just if you want more information on whether to contact us or just want to see how we could work together in the future, you can email us or visit our newly designed website, studentbridges.org. Or you can email us at studentbridges.gmail.com. We do have an official office space here on campus. We are currently in a swing space in Bartlett Hall, room 205. We are pretty much almost finished with decorating the office. The office is open. We are open weekdays, Mondays through Fridays from 10 to 5 p.m. And we are an open office space. We encourage all underrepresented students from all backgrounds to come and just chill if they want to. We offer our space as a safe space for students, even if they don't need anything in particular, if they just need to be in the presence of someone like them or just need like general advice or tips. Our office is open for that. We have a little lounge space, snacks, water, juice, you name it. We have it all for them. And we have our door open to everyone in the community. Anyone can come in, stop by. Dodell also has the office in Bartlett right down from our official office space, which is Bartlett 259. Yes, 259, stop by to Dodell's too. We're all in the same hall. And we welcome everyone with open arms. So now, yeah, so now we're gonna go to our next part, which Dodell's will explain. We don't have a lot of time, but I just wanted to say that, you know, our approach to our community engagement really motivates from that students' histories matter. You know, their history, their identities matter, their narratives matter. And when tutor mentors are in my class and they're developing in my class, not only are we learning about frameworks, educational inequities, equity, how do you do that? How do you engage? We also use a lot of reflection. And we really charge ourselves to investigate our assumptions and our positionality before we go into the community. And so part of what we do is do a lot of activities with students from the community in addition to the tutoring that they need. But we get to know who they are. So right now I know that we only have about, what is it, nine minutes? No, it's not like 10 minutes. Okay, 10 minutes, great. Can you go back to the other? Our community engagement just very quickly. So, you know, we have our assumptions, we have our guiding principles, and this is, I didn't create this, this is something that was there even before I got there. But they stick to build community with the tutor mentors, committed to meeting the needs within communities on reciprocity, all of the themes that we've talked about all day today. But most importantly for, it's that we believe that every young person has, is an agent of social change. And if they don't understand that, what is the process that we engage that student to kind of discover that and believe it, right? And trust it. So I just want you to take a couple of minutes and in your little cards, take, let's just take two because we don't have time to do four. And pick two identities of yours that are very salient to you, are very important. They're like everywhere you go, that's your, that's part of who you are. And write it in one, on one side of that. No, so one, on one card. Yeah, pick one identity and write that identity. Yeah. We might be able to just do one, but now you get the idea and you can do this with your community. On the other side of that card, what's the story behind that? Like, I know it's just a little tiny card. I know it doesn't fit a whole narrative in there, but you can bullet, bullet it. Why is it important to you? Why is that identity important to you? What about it, is it? If it's your name that you wrote down, then, you know, where did it come from? If it's your ethnicity, what parts of your ethnicity make it important? You know, what is salient about it? And then once you do that, turn to the person next to you. Use dialogue. Use the practice of dialogue. And give yourself a couple of minutes, not even a couple of minutes, a few seconds. And share with that person that what that identity is and why is it important. And then take a moment and listen to your partner as well, sharing that part of their identity as well. Okay, so I'm gonna give you like a minute. Couple minutes, thank you. Two minutes. I'm only being funny, just. Okay, I'm gonna interrupt you for one second. What are some of the identities that came up? Where's some? Hi everybody, I'm Luis Valdez. I work here at UMass and I picked Chicano because I think that that identifies me. And then in the back, I just bullet-pointed because we had a couple of seconds and I bullet-pointed that it was birth, the creation of space and place, movement, the movement of people, fire, struggle, and gente that brought me to that identity, so. Somebody else? Someone else wants to share? We're not the same person. So, that's okay. That's a short people problem, I understand. So I chose Puerto Rican, maybe because I'm wearing a guayabera today, but, and I thought of keywords when I think of Puerto Rican and maybe it's because we're around the anniversary of Maria and what it all means. And I feel like September 20th, 2017 was the day that it changed between lo de acá y lo de allá. And what diaspora really means. And who is la diaspora? Is it really us or is it the ones on the island because it keeps emptying out? And so I thought of three keywords, struggle, history, and resilience, and respecting all that and being aware and recognizing the differences between the difference, I mean between the Puerto Ricans that are here and the ones that are on the island and the ones that keep coming. So I'm just gonna ask you, how did it feel? Thank you, thank you for everybody participating and that's my phone. So how did it feel to talk about your identities? You can just popcorn, like you can just share. How did that feel? Good, power, okay, what else? Different. Okay, different, what do you say that? The choices, so many times that you can actually focus in who you are as an identity. Actually it took me a lot of time to define identity and I actually raised my hand almost, but you didn't see it. Sorry. That means, why do you want? Because I think it is, I didn't really know why, but when I finally came out with what you want or what I think you want to hear, I think it helps, but it was difficult. Great, thank you for not great that it was difficult, but what you're saying, yeah, it's extremely profound. The reason that I did this and that we do this, it's something that I learned from students themselves. Our young population that we work with, they tell us, they report to us, that people don't care about their identity. So the other part of this activity is that, then I would ask you to get rid of it. And then how does that feel? Exactly. So think about it if you're in a classroom and that's what you're feeling, right? You're like, you're crazy, I'm not gonna talk to you. But nobody investigates, why is it? Well, because you're not seeing me, because you're not incorporating my assets into this classroom. Because you don't understand that in fact, I have so many strengths. My identity is so complex. Why do you want to box it in? You make so many assumptions. So it's just an activity, but it's really powerful because we need to see our students and it takes time. And even structurally, teachers don't have time to do that too, right? So it gets even more complex. So I just wanna say thank you because we run out of time, but we do this kind of work. Student Bridges does a lot of these workshops and this is a brand new staff, so we're in training mode, but this is the kind of work we do. And thank you so much for letting us be here today and including us, but find us on the website. I'm Ja'Lalis. I'm Ja'Lalis. I'm Ja'Lalis. I'm Ja'Lalis. I'm Ja'Lalis. I'm Ja'Lalis. I'm Ja'Lalis. I'm Ja'Lalis. I'm Ja'Lalis. I'm Ja'Lalis.