This article is written primarily for individuals leading or engaging in continuous improvement work in schools who are interested in student-led networks. If you’re new to improvement and don’t understand terms or concepts here, we recommend you start with either “How to Plan and Implement Continuous Improvement Schools” by Katrina Schwartz for a brief introduction, or “Improvement as a Journey” by Amanda Meyer for a deeper dive.
Over the summer, Catalina, a graduating senior at High Tech High International planning to attend San Diego Mesa College met weekly and received support from a college student, Cornor, about making a successful transition. Cornor was able to speak to Catalina with credibility because he had navigated this very journey himself by starting at San Diego Mesa Community College and transferring to San Diego State University. Cornor explained: “I have been in your shoes before so I can show you what to watch out for and stay on top of and what you may not have to worry about. That would have been really beneficial to me”. Catalina echoed these themes in describing her experience in the C3 Mobility pilot program: “I felt really supported and comfortable in the program. Knowing that all of the other people around me were going through the same thing too and everyone is here to help.”
The C3 Mobility DAO (DAO stands for “Decentralized Autonomous Organization”) takes a simple – yet surprisingly uncommon – approach to the challenge of supporting students to make a successful college transition: we nurture a student-led improvement community where students are compensated for their participation. Starting in May 2022, C3 Mobility launched a small pilot with fourteen high school seniors representing student groups historically underrepresented in college. Seniors indicating plans to attend San Diego Mesa College (the mentees) were matched with four college students who started at San Diego Mesa College and transferred to a four-year college (the mentors). Through these peer relationships students received support and developed a sense of belonging. Within this community, students used the tools of continuous improvement to chart a collective path towards college success. Preliminary data from C3 Mobility is encouraging. According to publicly available IPEDS data, only 19% of San Diego Mesa College students are attending classes full time. In contrast, C3 Mobility mentees are enrolled full-time for fall 2022 at an 86% rate.
In collaboration with these eighteen young people, the improvement hub consisting of CARPE improvement coaches Jonathan Villafuerte and Dr. Sofía Tannenhaus, Julio Garcia-Granados, a data scientist, and Ben Sanoff, director of data analytics, launched the first C3 Mobility improvement community. This article details the inspiration for C3 Mobility, the development of the San Diego Mesa College pilot, the impact of this pilot, shared governance, and the future of C3 Mobility. This piece is co-written by the improvement hub and Cielo Cruz, one of the student mentors.
Origins and Inspirations
The CARPE College Access network is comprised of 30 high schools across Southern California collaborating to improve on four critical drivers of college enrollment: financial access, the college application process, fostering students’ sense of belonging, and reducing “summer melt” (that is, the tendency for students who planned to attend college in the spring encountering challenges over the summer which prevent them from enrolling). CARPE schools have worked to reduce summer melt by sending weekly personalized text messages to students and hiring a summer transition advisor to respond to students who are facing challenges completing college enrollment tasks. The network has developed the CARPE college transition playbook documenting promising practices to support a successful college transition.
Supporting a successful college transition is important work: of the 6,000+ students in the CARPE network, as many as 1 in 4 students who plan to attend college in the spring of their senior year do not actually end up enrolled in college the following fall.. At several CARPE schools we have experienced some success in reducing summer melt by implementing the practices detailed in the playbook. However, even at these bright spot schools, we have struggled to support a successful college transition for low-income and students of color planning to attend community colleges. Particularly concerning are the low rates of first semester full-time enrollment at community colleges, which is a strong leading indicator of college retention and graduation. In fact, CARPE students who enroll full-time during their first semester are more than two times more likely to graduate from college within six years.
Seeking to understand this problem, we conducted empathy interviews with low-income students and students of color who had enrolled at community college. We identified two primary barriers for students to successfully transition were financial need and lack of belonging in college. The financial need that low-income students in California experience has been well documented: “66% of Black and first-generation college students face food insecurity and 18% are houseless” (CSU Report). Needless to say, it’s hard to pass classes when you have to work full-time, when you don’t have enough to eat, and when you don’t feel you belong.
With a better understanding of the problem, we sought to address these two barriers to students making a successful transition to community college. In our driver diagram (figure 1), we identified the following three primary drivers: financial capital to alleviate economic hardship, social capital to nurture belonging, and navigational capital to increase understanding of how to leverage institutional resources.
Figure 1: C3 Mobility DAO Driver Diagram. A flowchart titled “C3 Mobility DAO Summer Pilot” showing the relationships between the program’s aim, intentions, and guidelines.
During empathy interviews with prospective mentors, student expertise about San Diego Mesa Community College stood out. We realized that the students themselves could provide the navigational capital we had identified as a primary driver. Research confirms the potential of having students support one another. In an Education Trust article, Paula Kashtan explains:
As numerous studies have shown, the benefits of peer leadership are vast. Students are often more likely to build rapport and take guidance from someone with whom they can closely relate, and peers can offer a sense of community and connection that goes beyond what adult staff members are able to provide.
This led us to decide on a peer-to-peer model of support. Underrepresented students who had made this successful transition from High Tech High to San Diego Mesa College would serve as mentors to underrepresented students planning to attend San Diego Mesa College in the fall of 2022 (mentees).
As part of the CARPE network, members of the improvement hub have developed a powerful “student ambassador” program. In this program, students are integrated into the improvement work of their school team. They provide feedback to school staff about their ideas from a student perspective but ultimately school staff retain decision-making power. In C3 Mobility, we sought to move up the ladder of student participation to a student-initiated, student-directed community.
In developing C3 Mobility, we worried that the student-led improvement community we sought to nurture could easily be co-opted by the improvement hub. In the Freirian spirit of seeking to build with young people, rather than for them, we built in guardrails ensuring this would remain a student-led community. To accomplish this, we structured C3 Mobility as a DAO to formalize the role of students in shared governance and to decentralize power away from the hub team. DAOs are digital organizations where each member of the community is allocated governance rights and encouraged to participate in direct democracy by voting on proposals that emerge from the community. This governance process is described in more detail in the last section of this article.
Nurturing the C3 Community
Starting in January 2022, the C3 hub team began the work of nurturing a student-led improvement community to support more students from High Tech High (HTH) making a successful transition to San Diego Mesa College. We chose this for our first pilot due to our close relationships with HTH Schools, access to the data we needed, and a pressing need to better support underrepresented HTH students in enrolling full time at San Diego Mesa College. Using the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) data we were able to identify under-represented HTH alumni who started at San Diego Mesa College and transferred to a four-year college. In April 2022, we had students apply to join the program as mentors and then conducted interviews to identify alumni who we thought would make strong mentors. Ultimately, four mentors were identified including three HTH alumni who had started at Mesa College and then transferred to a four year college and one HTH alumnus who was experiencing success in his 2nd year at Mesa College.
To recruit mentees, we partnered with college advisors at four HTH Schools to identify and encourage Mesa-bound graduating seniors to apply to the C3 program. The personal recommendation from these familiar support systems added value and credibility to our pilot program. Of the approximately 25 students planning to attend San Diego Mesa College, 20 students applied to participate. Prioritizing students of color, first generation, or low- to middle-income students, we selected 14 of the 20 applicants.
Over several meetings with the four C3 mentors in May 2022, we introduced the C3 driver diagram, engaged in decision-making about the structure of the community, and developed the agenda for the community kickoff in June 2022. We engaged mentors as experts in their own experience by asking them to identify key tasks necessary for students to enroll full-time at San Diego Mesa College. By consulting the college’s website and cross referencing this set of key tasks generated by the mentors we created an interactive process map of all the steps necessary to successfully transition from High Tech High to full-time enrollment at San Diego Mesa College.
At the network kick off event in June, the mentors served as the primary facilitators and welcomed mentees with music, warm greetings, and lunch. Mentors took the stage and explained the reasons why mentees were chosen, their similar paths, and how they could work together to transition into community college.
The mentors detailed each step of the transition process by introducing the interactive process map we had developed. Mentors shared their own experience completing these tasks to normalize the challenges mentees would likely face. The mentors facilitated a session in which each mentee used the interactive process map (figure 2). Mentees indicated where they were in the transition process. When they got to a task they had not yet completed they were provided the appropriate link and instructions in real-time to get that task done. Mentors sat alongside them answering questions while providing support and reassurance.
Figure 2: Interactive Process Map. A screen from the Typeform Interactive Process Map, titled, “Have you completed the Mesa Promise application?” with “yes” and “no” answer options.
Over the summer, mentors met weekly with mentees to deepen their relationships, answer questions and challenges, and support mentees in completing all of the transition tasks. Each week, the hub team led a data huddle with the mentors. We utilized the process map activity responses to produce a data display** (figure 3), which tracked where each mentee was in the transition process. This was the core component of the mentoring process because it provided mentors a clear picture of each mentee’s status, a log of their conversations, and a place to gather questions that needed to be addressed.
Figure 3: Transition Process Data Display. An image of the form with a comment highlighting the “Notes” field, reading, “Notes section where mentors could set intentions for the week and then check to see whether that happened”, and another comment drawing attention to the “Checklist” feature, reading, “Allows mentors to track progress of each mentee in completing key enrollment tasks. It is editable within this interface.”
This display and all the data infrastructure for this project was built in Airtable (this article describes some examples of educators building their own software in tools like Airtable).
Each week members of the improvement team met with the four mentors to discuss how to best support the mentees by reviewing the data display and engaging in a huddle. During weekly huddles, mentors had time to review their mentees progress in the data display, reflect on what they had accomplished the previous week, and set intentions for the current week. Mentors took turns facilitating these Data Huddles, sharing best practices, and creating action items to support mentees. These weekly meetings also served as an opportunity for the improvement hub to share their own wisdom by introducing topics like career development, financial literacy, and leadership.
Cielo Cruz, a C3 mentor, explained:
Using the dashboard was amazing as I was able to input everything I talked about with all mentees into an organized collection of information. If I needed to call them a second time that week or just check in I could go back and see what we talked about or what they wanted to accomplish for the following week and bring it up again. I also used it to write notes of each mentee and if they had a question I couldn’t answer in that meeting I would try to have an answer by the next.
Cielo explained the C3 approach to mentoring was about developing meaningful relationships rather than just transactional support completing enrollment tasks:
Because I have lived through the experience of graduating HTH and going to Mesa College, I knew the uncertainty of not knowing how to complete the specific tasks in order to be enrolled and I never had anyone to ask. In this program I did my best to make myself available at all times. I checked in with my mentees over zoom weekly where I gave them some tips on how to sign up for class and which classes would be best to handle the first semester of college. We talked about many different things, as I made it a point to talk about school or how their summer was going for a majority of the call in order to establish a connection and make them feel comfortable. Most often we talked about how to navigate the Mesa website and how to look for specific people/programs that can help them best after C3 ended.
Providing a concrete example of the type of support mentors provided, Cielo explains,
My mentee Nicole was struggling to understand what her FAFSA money meant. She texted me the question on a day where I was free so we Facetimed to talk through what unsubsidized vs subsidized loans were (we did a little research together) as well as what grants meant. She was comfortable enough to show me her document and I was able to even further explain if she was to accept the grants, how they would be distributed and when she should accept to receive them.
Every other week, the improvement hub compensated mentees over Venmo based on their contribution to the community. Mentees were compensated for completing important enrollment tasks and for participating in the community by attending events and engaging with their mentors. Mentees on average were paid $360 for their participation in C3 with some students earning as much as $550. Mentors were paid two $800 stipends for a total of $1,600 for their work supporting mentees.
Our closing celebration took place on the campus of San Diego Mesa College. By this point, mentors owned their shared responsibility to design a powerful experience for mentees. Again, mentees were greeted with authentic care, but with a new-found sense of belonging. Mentors took turns sharing their wisdom and motivating students; the personal anecdotes were raw and insightful. Mentees were attentive and inspired. The connection was profound and the outcomes were significant – the C3 Mobility community was successful.
Impact
Preliminary data suggests that we achieved our aim of 85% or more C3 mentees enrolling full-time. Twelve of fourteen or 86% of C3 mentees are enrolled full-time at San Diego Mesa College for the fall 2022 semester. In comparison, San Diego Mesa College has a full-time enrollment rate of 19% according to publicly available IPEDS data. Unfortunately, one C3 mentee melted over the summer. However, the 7% rate of summer melt amongst C3 mentees compares favorably to a 21% melt rate for HTH 2020 and 2021 graduates.
On a survey administered to 12 of 14 C3 mentees at the closing event, students reported that the program supported them in making a successful transition to San Diego Mesa College. Specifically, 92% C3 mentees reported that the C3 program and their mentor were helpful or very helpful in setting them up for success at Mesa. In addition, 10 out of 12 mentees would strongly recommend the C3 program to a senior planning to attend Mesa next year.
Perhaps explaining the reason for this positive feedback, one mentee articulated:
“The most helpful thing about the C3 program was always feeling like I had someone to turn to whenever I had a question.”
One mentor, Ethan, shared the impact of being in a position to support someone embarking on a similar path as his:
When I was first going from a high school senior to a college freshman, it was a confusing time for me. I didn’t really have anyone to look to…no one in my family had really gone to school, so figuring all that out on my own was a challenge for me…I do really think that living through that and struggling through that was good for me because if I can pass on my knowledge to people that are going into community college, telling them what they should do, what they shouldn’t do, just letting them know that [their] feelings are completely fine…I think that’s the help that they’re going to need.
Cielo expressed similar sentiments about helping a younger student through an unfamiliar, and sometimes intimidating, process:
I genuinely loved helping my mentee know what this meant as I had been in the same boat a few years back. I remember feeling silly asking what my FAFSA document meant and going to a professional at my school seemed scary so I went to a counselor at Mesa College who walked me through what it meant, so being able to replay the moment but where I was the person helping gave me a sense of accomplishment.
While anecdotal, the power of near-peer mentorship is powerful and transformative, not only for the college-bound students, but for the mentors as well.
C3 Mobility paid 14 mentees $5,400 and the four mentors were paid $6,400 for a total of $11,800. In addition, C3 issued two emergency grants for a total of $800 that mentees and mentors could apply for at any point in the program to address financial emergencies. Mentees reported that they spent their stipends from C3 for these common purposes: Mesa parking pass, books for classes, gas, and saved the money to create an emergency fund.
Our post-survey results show that nine out of 12 mentees feel fairly or very confident about graduating or transferring from Mesa College within two years. We attribute this to the program’s focus on the three primary drivers: financial capital/literacy, social capital, and navigational capital. Through anecdotal evidence and C3 mobility program outcomes, we find that near-peer mentorship integrated into the continuous improvement framework is a high leverage investment.
Shared Governance and Future Plans
As a DAO, C3 Mobility seeks to engage our community in decision-making and governance. Since this was a pilot, we focused on engaging mentors as decision-makers with the hope of learning how this could work with mentees for future iterations of this program. From our first meeting with mentors, we provided them opportunities to make decisions that would impact the community. For example, mentors decided how often they would meet with mentees, how we would communicate with mentees, how we would pay mentees, and how much we should pay mentees for completing specific tasks. In addition, mentors made many of the design decisions and were the primary facilitators for the kick off and closing events. Initially, we engaged in an informal decision-making process using fist-to-five voting. Each mentor voted on a one to five scale about whether they supported a proposal. If they voted a “one” that would effectively veto that proposal. We found this to be a helpful process because we could quickly vote and if any mentor was less than a “five” we could ask them to explain why. This would quickly surface concerns or objections that we could talk through as a group.
Traditionally DAOs engage in formal governance and invite each member of their community to vote on proposals that emerge from the community. DAO community members are issued a governance token, vote using a Web3 application like Snapshot, and these votes are recorded on the blockchain. We worried that starting with this formal DAO governance process would be overwhelming to mentors. For this reason, we started with a simple decision-making (fist to five voting) process. In addition, Web3 wallets like Metamask that DAO members use to vote can be confusing so we took the time to explain how these wallets work. Despite these challenges, if we were to operate as a DAO and have students participate as equals in governance we would need to vote on the future direction of C3 Mobility on the blockchain.
In service of this goal, we facilitated a closing meeting with all four mentors where we scaffolded the process of generating governance proposals and voting on the blockchain. We started this process by reviewing the end of survey feedback from mentees, particularly the longer open-ended responses where mentees described opportunities to improve the C3 program moving forward. Based on this feedback, each participant generated proposals of what should be changed about C3 moving forward. Then we clustered similar proposals and everyone had five votes to distribute to the proposals we thought most important. Any proposal receiving more than three votes was then added to the C3 Mobility Snapshot site. Snapshot is a Web3 application which allows members of DAO communities to vote on the blockchain.
C3 Mobility minted the OPP governance token and then distributed 10 OPP tokens to the Web3 wallet of each mentor and member of the improvement hub. Everyone then logged into the C3 Snapshot Site and voted on each of the proposals. In this way, tools like Snapshot support direct democracy where each community member votes to determine the direction of a project. As a community, C3 passed the following proposals for future iterations of the program:
Figure 4: C3 Snapshot Site. A screen from the site showing the results of four polls to yes-or-no questions related to College, Career, Capital Mobility.
This first C3 Mobility pilot focused on San Diego Mesa College provides strong proof of concept justifying further experimentation and iteration. The results of this pilot suggest student-led improvement communities offer a powerful framework to bring together young people to address real world issues like inequitable educational outcomes. In addition, DAOs can offer an organizational structure for improvement networks that decentralize power away from the hub through community governance. We also see great potential in incubating new types of educational philanthropy like C3 Mobility where direct cash transfers are administered by the student community. Just as noteworthy is the invaluable impact of providing college-bound students with personalized support from a student who has walked their path and the leadership opportunity for underrepresented students to step into a transformative role, build their confidence, and thrive.
This article is written primarily for individuals leading or engaging in continuous improvement work in schools who are interested in student-led networks. If you’re new to improvement and don’t understand terms or concepts here, we recommend you start with either “How to Plan and Implement Continuous Improvement Schools” by Katrina Schwartz for a brief introduction, or “Improvement as a Journey” by Amanda Meyer for a deeper dive.
Over the summer, Catalina, a graduating senior at High Tech High International planning to attend San Diego Mesa College met weekly and received support from a college student, Cornor, about making a successful transition. Cornor was able to speak to Catalina with credibility because he had navigated this very journey himself by starting at San Diego Mesa Community College and transferring to San Diego State University. Cornor explained: “I have been in your shoes before so I can show you what to watch out for and stay on top of and what you may not have to worry about. That would have been really beneficial to me”. Catalina echoed these themes in describing her experience in the C3 Mobility pilot program: “I felt really supported and comfortable in the program. Knowing that all of the other people around me were going through the same thing too and everyone is here to help.”
The C3 Mobility DAO (DAO stands for “Decentralized Autonomous Organization”) takes a simple – yet surprisingly uncommon – approach to the challenge of supporting students to make a successful college transition: we nurture a student-led improvement community where students are compensated for their participation. Starting in May 2022, C3 Mobility launched a small pilot with fourteen high school seniors representing student groups historically underrepresented in college. Seniors indicating plans to attend San Diego Mesa College (the mentees) were matched with four college students who started at San Diego Mesa College and transferred to a four-year college (the mentors). Through these peer relationships students received support and developed a sense of belonging. Within this community, students used the tools of continuous improvement to chart a collective path towards college success. Preliminary data from C3 Mobility is encouraging. According to publicly available IPEDS data, only 19% of San Diego Mesa College students are attending classes full time. In contrast, C3 Mobility mentees are enrolled full-time for fall 2022 at an 86% rate.
In collaboration with these eighteen young people, the improvement hub consisting of CARPE improvement coaches Jonathan Villafuerte and Dr. Sofía Tannenhaus, Julio Garcia-Granados, a data scientist, and Ben Sanoff, director of data analytics, launched the first C3 Mobility improvement community. This article details the inspiration for C3 Mobility, the development of the San Diego Mesa College pilot, the impact of this pilot, shared governance, and the future of C3 Mobility. This piece is co-written by the improvement hub and Cielo Cruz, one of the student mentors.
Origins and Inspirations
The CARPE College Access network is comprised of 30 high schools across Southern California collaborating to improve on four critical drivers of college enrollment: financial access, the college application process, fostering students’ sense of belonging, and reducing “summer melt” (that is, the tendency for students who planned to attend college in the spring encountering challenges over the summer which prevent them from enrolling). CARPE schools have worked to reduce summer melt by sending weekly personalized text messages to students and hiring a summer transition advisor to respond to students who are facing challenges completing college enrollment tasks. The network has developed the CARPE college transition playbook documenting promising practices to support a successful college transition.
Supporting a successful college transition is important work: of the 6,000+ students in the CARPE network, as many as 1 in 4 students who plan to attend college in the spring of their senior year do not actually end up enrolled in college the following fall.. At several CARPE schools we have experienced some success in reducing summer melt by implementing the practices detailed in the playbook. However, even at these bright spot schools, we have struggled to support a successful college transition for low-income and students of color planning to attend community colleges. Particularly concerning are the low rates of first semester full-time enrollment at community colleges, which is a strong leading indicator of college retention and graduation. In fact, CARPE students who enroll full-time during their first semester are more than two times more likely to graduate from college within six years.
Seeking to understand this problem, we conducted empathy interviews with low-income students and students of color who had enrolled at community college. We identified two primary barriers for students to successfully transition were financial need and lack of belonging in college. The financial need that low-income students in California experience has been well documented: “66% of Black and first-generation college students face food insecurity and 18% are houseless” (CSU Report). Needless to say, it’s hard to pass classes when you have to work full-time, when you don’t have enough to eat, and when you don’t feel you belong.
With a better understanding of the problem, we sought to address these two barriers to students making a successful transition to community college. In our driver diagram (figure 1), we identified the following three primary drivers: financial capital to alleviate economic hardship, social capital to nurture belonging, and navigational capital to increase understanding of how to leverage institutional resources.
Figure 1: C3 Mobility DAO Driver Diagram. A flowchart titled “C3 Mobility DAO Summer Pilot” showing the relationships between the program’s aim, intentions, and guidelines.
During empathy interviews with prospective mentors, student expertise about San Diego Mesa Community College stood out. We realized that the students themselves could provide the navigational capital we had identified as a primary driver. Research confirms the potential of having students support one another. In an Education Trust article, Paula Kashtan explains:
As numerous studies have shown, the benefits of peer leadership are vast. Students are often more likely to build rapport and take guidance from someone with whom they can closely relate, and peers can offer a sense of community and connection that goes beyond what adult staff members are able to provide.
This led us to decide on a peer-to-peer model of support. Underrepresented students who had made this successful transition from High Tech High to San Diego Mesa College would serve as mentors to underrepresented students planning to attend San Diego Mesa College in the fall of 2022 (mentees).
As part of the CARPE network, members of the improvement hub have developed a powerful “student ambassador” program. In this program, students are integrated into the improvement work of their school team. They provide feedback to school staff about their ideas from a student perspective but ultimately school staff retain decision-making power. In C3 Mobility, we sought to move up the ladder of student participation to a student-initiated, student-directed community.
In developing C3 Mobility, we worried that the student-led improvement community we sought to nurture could easily be co-opted by the improvement hub. In the Freirian spirit of seeking to build with young people, rather than for them, we built in guardrails ensuring this would remain a student-led community. To accomplish this, we structured C3 Mobility as a DAO to formalize the role of students in shared governance and to decentralize power away from the hub team. DAOs are digital organizations where each member of the community is allocated governance rights and encouraged to participate in direct democracy by voting on proposals that emerge from the community. This governance process is described in more detail in the last section of this article.
Nurturing the C3 Community
Starting in January 2022, the C3 hub team began the work of nurturing a student-led improvement community to support more students from High Tech High (HTH) making a successful transition to San Diego Mesa College. We chose this for our first pilot due to our close relationships with HTH Schools, access to the data we needed, and a pressing need to better support underrepresented HTH students in enrolling full time at San Diego Mesa College. Using the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) data we were able to identify under-represented HTH alumni who started at San Diego Mesa College and transferred to a four-year college. In April 2022, we had students apply to join the program as mentors and then conducted interviews to identify alumni who we thought would make strong mentors. Ultimately, four mentors were identified including three HTH alumni who had started at Mesa College and then transferred to a four year college and one HTH alumnus who was experiencing success in his 2nd year at Mesa College.
To recruit mentees, we partnered with college advisors at four HTH Schools to identify and encourage Mesa-bound graduating seniors to apply to the C3 program. The personal recommendation from these familiar support systems added value and credibility to our pilot program. Of the approximately 25 students planning to attend San Diego Mesa College, 20 students applied to participate. Prioritizing students of color, first generation, or low- to middle-income students, we selected 14 of the 20 applicants.
Over several meetings with the four C3 mentors in May 2022, we introduced the C3 driver diagram, engaged in decision-making about the structure of the community, and developed the agenda for the community kickoff in June 2022. We engaged mentors as experts in their own experience by asking them to identify key tasks necessary for students to enroll full-time at San Diego Mesa College. By consulting the college’s website and cross referencing this set of key tasks generated by the mentors we created an interactive process map of all the steps necessary to successfully transition from High Tech High to full-time enrollment at San Diego Mesa College.
At the network kick off event in June, the mentors served as the primary facilitators and welcomed mentees with music, warm greetings, and lunch. Mentors took the stage and explained the reasons why mentees were chosen, their similar paths, and how they could work together to transition into community college.
The mentors detailed each step of the transition process by introducing the interactive process map we had developed. Mentors shared their own experience completing these tasks to normalize the challenges mentees would likely face. The mentors facilitated a session in which each mentee used the interactive process map (figure 2). Mentees indicated where they were in the transition process. When they got to a task they had not yet completed they were provided the appropriate link and instructions in real-time to get that task done. Mentors sat alongside them answering questions while providing support and reassurance.
Figure 2: Interactive Process Map. A screen from the Typeform Interactive Process Map, titled, “Have you completed the Mesa Promise application?” with “yes” and “no” answer options.
Over the summer, mentors met weekly with mentees to deepen their relationships, answer questions and challenges, and support mentees in completing all of the transition tasks. Each week, the hub team led a data huddle with the mentors. We utilized the process map activity responses to produce a data display** (figure 3), which tracked where each mentee was in the transition process. This was the core component of the mentoring process because it provided mentors a clear picture of each mentee’s status, a log of their conversations, and a place to gather questions that needed to be addressed.
Figure 3: Transition Process Data Display. An image of the form with a comment highlighting the “Notes” field, reading, “Notes section where mentors could set intentions for the week and then check to see whether that happened”, and another comment drawing attention to the “Checklist” feature, reading, “Allows mentors to track progress of each mentee in completing key enrollment tasks. It is editable within this interface.”
This display and all the data infrastructure for this project was built in Airtable (this article describes some examples of educators building their own software in tools like Airtable).
Each week members of the improvement team met with the four mentors to discuss how to best support the mentees by reviewing the data display and engaging in a huddle. During weekly huddles, mentors had time to review their mentees progress in the data display, reflect on what they had accomplished the previous week, and set intentions for the current week. Mentors took turns facilitating these Data Huddles, sharing best practices, and creating action items to support mentees. These weekly meetings also served as an opportunity for the improvement hub to share their own wisdom by introducing topics like career development, financial literacy, and leadership.
Cielo Cruz, a C3 mentor, explained:
Using the dashboard was amazing as I was able to input everything I talked about with all mentees into an organized collection of information. If I needed to call them a second time that week or just check in I could go back and see what we talked about or what they wanted to accomplish for the following week and bring it up again. I also used it to write notes of each mentee and if they had a question I couldn’t answer in that meeting I would try to have an answer by the next.
Cielo explained the C3 approach to mentoring was about developing meaningful relationships rather than just transactional support completing enrollment tasks:
Because I have lived through the experience of graduating HTH and going to Mesa College, I knew the uncertainty of not knowing how to complete the specific tasks in order to be enrolled and I never had anyone to ask. In this program I did my best to make myself available at all times. I checked in with my mentees over zoom weekly where I gave them some tips on how to sign up for class and which classes would be best to handle the first semester of college. We talked about many different things, as I made it a point to talk about school or how their summer was going for a majority of the call in order to establish a connection and make them feel comfortable. Most often we talked about how to navigate the Mesa website and how to look for specific people/programs that can help them best after C3 ended.
Providing a concrete example of the type of support mentors provided, Cielo explains,
My mentee Nicole was struggling to understand what her FAFSA money meant. She texted me the question on a day where I was free so we Facetimed to talk through what unsubsidized vs subsidized loans were (we did a little research together) as well as what grants meant. She was comfortable enough to show me her document and I was able to even further explain if she was to accept the grants, how they would be distributed and when she should accept to receive them.
Every other week, the improvement hub compensated mentees over Venmo based on their contribution to the community. Mentees were compensated for completing important enrollment tasks and for participating in the community by attending events and engaging with their mentors. Mentees on average were paid $360 for their participation in C3 with some students earning as much as $550. Mentors were paid two $800 stipends for a total of $1,600 for their work supporting mentees.
Our closing celebration took place on the campus of San Diego Mesa College. By this point, mentors owned their shared responsibility to design a powerful experience for mentees. Again, mentees were greeted with authentic care, but with a new-found sense of belonging. Mentors took turns sharing their wisdom and motivating students; the personal anecdotes were raw and insightful. Mentees were attentive and inspired. The connection was profound and the outcomes were significant – the C3 Mobility community was successful.
Impact
Preliminary data suggests that we achieved our aim of 85% or more C3 mentees enrolling full-time. Twelve of fourteen or 86% of C3 mentees are enrolled full-time at San Diego Mesa College for the fall 2022 semester. In comparison, San Diego Mesa College has a full-time enrollment rate of 19% according to publicly available IPEDS data. Unfortunately, one C3 mentee melted over the summer. However, the 7% rate of summer melt amongst C3 mentees compares favorably to a 21% melt rate for HTH 2020 and 2021 graduates.
On a survey administered to 12 of 14 C3 mentees at the closing event, students reported that the program supported them in making a successful transition to San Diego Mesa College. Specifically, 92% C3 mentees reported that the C3 program and their mentor were helpful or very helpful in setting them up for success at Mesa. In addition, 10 out of 12 mentees would strongly recommend the C3 program to a senior planning to attend Mesa next year.
Perhaps explaining the reason for this positive feedback, one mentee articulated:
“The most helpful thing about the C3 program was always feeling like I had someone to turn to whenever I had a question.”
One mentor, Ethan, shared the impact of being in a position to support someone embarking on a similar path as his:
When I was first going from a high school senior to a college freshman, it was a confusing time for me. I didn’t really have anyone to look to…no one in my family had really gone to school, so figuring all that out on my own was a challenge for me…I do really think that living through that and struggling through that was good for me because if I can pass on my knowledge to people that are going into community college, telling them what they should do, what they shouldn’t do, just letting them know that [their] feelings are completely fine…I think that’s the help that they’re going to need.
Cielo expressed similar sentiments about helping a younger student through an unfamiliar, and sometimes intimidating, process:
I genuinely loved helping my mentee know what this meant as I had been in the same boat a few years back. I remember feeling silly asking what my FAFSA document meant and going to a professional at my school seemed scary so I went to a counselor at Mesa College who walked me through what it meant, so being able to replay the moment but where I was the person helping gave me a sense of accomplishment.
While anecdotal, the power of near-peer mentorship is powerful and transformative, not only for the college-bound students, but for the mentors as well.
C3 Mobility paid 14 mentees $5,400 and the four mentors were paid $6,400 for a total of $11,800. In addition, C3 issued two emergency grants for a total of $800 that mentees and mentors could apply for at any point in the program to address financial emergencies. Mentees reported that they spent their stipends from C3 for these common purposes: Mesa parking pass, books for classes, gas, and saved the money to create an emergency fund.
Our post-survey results show that nine out of 12 mentees feel fairly or very confident about graduating or transferring from Mesa College within two years. We attribute this to the program’s focus on the three primary drivers: financial capital/literacy, social capital, and navigational capital. Through anecdotal evidence and C3 mobility program outcomes, we find that near-peer mentorship integrated into the continuous improvement framework is a high leverage investment.
Shared Governance and Future Plans
As a DAO, C3 Mobility seeks to engage our community in decision-making and governance. Since this was a pilot, we focused on engaging mentors as decision-makers with the hope of learning how this could work with mentees for future iterations of this program. From our first meeting with mentors, we provided them opportunities to make decisions that would impact the community. For example, mentors decided how often they would meet with mentees, how we would communicate with mentees, how we would pay mentees, and how much we should pay mentees for completing specific tasks. In addition, mentors made many of the design decisions and were the primary facilitators for the kick off and closing events. Initially, we engaged in an informal decision-making process using fist-to-five voting. Each mentor voted on a one to five scale about whether they supported a proposal. If they voted a “one” that would effectively veto that proposal. We found this to be a helpful process because we could quickly vote and if any mentor was less than a “five” we could ask them to explain why. This would quickly surface concerns or objections that we could talk through as a group.
Traditionally DAOs engage in formal governance and invite each member of their community to vote on proposals that emerge from the community. DAO community members are issued a governance token, vote using a Web3 application like Snapshot, and these votes are recorded on the blockchain. We worried that starting with this formal DAO governance process would be overwhelming to mentors. For this reason, we started with a simple decision-making (fist to five voting) process. In addition, Web3 wallets like Metamask that DAO members use to vote can be confusing so we took the time to explain how these wallets work. Despite these challenges, if we were to operate as a DAO and have students participate as equals in governance we would need to vote on the future direction of C3 Mobility on the blockchain.
In service of this goal, we facilitated a closing meeting with all four mentors where we scaffolded the process of generating governance proposals and voting on the blockchain. We started this process by reviewing the end of survey feedback from mentees, particularly the longer open-ended responses where mentees described opportunities to improve the C3 program moving forward. Based on this feedback, each participant generated proposals of what should be changed about C3 moving forward. Then we clustered similar proposals and everyone had five votes to distribute to the proposals we thought most important. Any proposal receiving more than three votes was then added to the C3 Mobility Snapshot site. Snapshot is a Web3 application which allows members of DAO communities to vote on the blockchain.
C3 Mobility minted the OPP governance token and then distributed 10 OPP tokens to the Web3 wallet of each mentor and member of the improvement hub. Everyone then logged into the C3 Snapshot Site and voted on each of the proposals. In this way, tools like Snapshot support direct democracy where each community member votes to determine the direction of a project. As a community, C3 passed the following proposals for future iterations of the program:
Figure 4: C3 Snapshot Site. A screen from the site showing the results of four polls to yes-or-no questions related to College, Career, Capital Mobility.
This first C3 Mobility pilot focused on San Diego Mesa College provides strong proof of concept justifying further experimentation and iteration. The results of this pilot suggest student-led improvement communities offer a powerful framework to bring together young people to address real world issues like inequitable educational outcomes. In addition, DAOs can offer an organizational structure for improvement networks that decentralize power away from the hub through community governance. We also see great potential in incubating new types of educational philanthropy like C3 Mobility where direct cash transfers are administered by the student community. Just as noteworthy is the invaluable impact of providing college-bound students with personalized support from a student who has walked their path and the leadership opportunity for underrepresented students to step into a transformative role, build their confidence, and thrive.
