Jesse S. Chanin

The Freedom Project Network consists of three Mississippi-based youth empowerment organizations and two college access and persistence initiatives, Freedom Summer Collegiate and the Alumni College Success Program. Taken together, Freedom Fellows participate in a 10+-year youth empowerment fellowship from 7th grade through college graduation focused on activism, authentic self-expression, academic enrichment, college access, and college completion. Now that these projects have developed cohesion as a seventh-grade-through-college-graduation fellowship, Freedom Project Network has a unique opportunity to integrate these components more fully, to assess the impact of these programs as they build on each other, and to develop means of assessing the impact of this experience overall and over a long-term period on students’ ultimate social and economic empowerment. The Leading Edge Fellow will lead these efforts over the course of the 12-month fellowship, collecting and assessing individual program outcomes, soliciting information and feedback from program stakeholders, and developing integrated systems of program evaluation and assessment.