Hancock's BIGE Club Receives $10K Grant
JUNE 8, 2020 -- Allan Hancock College’s Beyond Incarceration Greater Education (BIGE) Club was awarded a $10,000 grant from The Fund for Santa Barbara.
The grant will allow the club to conduct outreach to local at-risk youth and help remove financial barriers for formerly incarcerated students as they work to earn a college degree or certificate at Hancock.
“I am humbled and grateful to The Fund for Santa Barbara for awarding us this grant, which will be used to help individuals who are seeking a second chance at life through higher education,” said BIGE Club President and co-founder Arturo Raygoza. “It will also allow us to help educate our community and break the stigma and negative stereotypes about formerly incarcerated individuals.
BIGE is a campus club and support network for formerly incarcerated Hancock students. The club provides a space for students to talk about their college experience, provides access to college and community resources and helps foster a sense of belonging on the college campus.
The grant will allow the club to conduct outreach activities to at-risk youth and newly released individuals coming from incarceration. The outreach effort is designed to redirect youth and reentry individuals away from the criminal justice system and toward the education system by providing information, role-modeling success and providing leadership and a sense of community.
“We hope to stop them from thinking they only have a narrow avenue of choices and show them they actually have an entire world of careers and education within reach,” said Raygoza. “We are trying to catch them before they get too deeply into trouble, or back into trouble, and provide paths to success.”
Some of the grant dollars will also be used to provide emergency funds to help formerly incarcerated students pay for textbooks, transportation, food and other financial burdens that could interfere with or divert focus from college and career aspirations.
The Fund for Santa Barbara is a 501(c)3 nonprofit community foundation dedicated to addressing the root causes of social, economic, environmental and political challenges in Santa Barbara County. The fund raises money through donations of all sizes to provide grants and technical assistance to local grassroots efforts. The fund supports community-based projects working for “Change, Not Charity”; through a variety of strategies, including community organizing, direct action, popular education, legislative advocacy and the arts.
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