A small liberal arts college in Dallas is doing the hard work of busting generational poverty

Educating students in poverty requires going far beyond the classroom to prepare them to learn. This is true for small children, and it is true for young adults, many of whom carry the traumas of a lifetime of bearing the physical and emotional stress of living with scarcity.

Paul Quinn College, a historically black college in Dallas, is taking on the challenge of halting generational poverty. Administrators are learning that students' needs for help and care go deeper than they could have anticipated. So President Michael Sorrell and his band of problem-solvers keep innovating to address each issue as it crops up. Sorrell and his top leaders met recently with the Dallas Morning News editorial board to talk about a new set of approaches they are implementing.



Michael Sorrell, president: We believe the higher educational institutions should turn themselves outward, and address the issues of the day — whatever are the issues that are important to the communities that the school serves, however they choose to define that.

We think that one of the reasons why higher education is so poorly thought of right now is because quite candidly the institutions themselves have behaved selfishly. They haven't spoken to the needs that communities have.

And we started doing that, almost from Day One. You know? We turned the football field into a farm, to address issues of food insecurity. You know? We look at environmental justice issues, and the work program is really an attempt to redefine how students see themselves and their lives and to address preparedness, and access and affordability issues. So for us, what we as an institution decided to do is, we want to eradicate any generational poverty. That's sort of our North Star of ambition. And we decided to do that by creating a version of higher education which we think allows us to poverty-proof students who have the experience.

And the way to think about what we do now is to really look at it in sort of three tranches. Number one, we created the model of the urban work college. Work college is not a new concept, but it's never been applied in an urban environment. Our version of it requires students to work for a couple years on campus. But then to go work off-campus.

Read more: https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2019/04/07/a-small-liberal-arts-college-in-dallas-is-doing-the-hard-work-of-busting-generational-poverty

Cross-posted in the Texas Group.