One of the things we value most here at Dani West is our relationships with other local businesses and our community. It has become our tradition to find ways to give back to our community, and for the second year in a row we have partnered with a local nonprofit called Collegiate Crossings. For each gown sold in the month of December we will be donating $50 to Collegiate Crossings. Recently, we had the pleasure of sitting down with Carey McClure, the executive director/college planner for Collegiate Crossings to learn a little more about who they are.
Collegiate Crossings was founded in 2012 and is a non-profit post secondary education organization that assists students with planning, financing, and applications. Carey had originally worked for other non-profits and during that time she began to see that generational poverty and other difficult situations often turned into cycles that were not easily broken. Through her work, she began to see that getting an education was the best way to break those cycles.
In the beginning, the target demographic for Collegiate Crossings was high school students. During their four years in high school, Collegiate Crossings helped students to determine their next steps, apply to colleges, and assist with financing. As the non-profit has grown, so has their demographic. Post-COVID, they began to see an emergence of more non-traditional students, those who were either not directly out of high school or those looking for a new career path. Since then, Collegiate Crossings has expanded to assist post-high school students.
One of Carey’s most memorable stories from her work was when she was working with a young lady who was a first generation student from a low income household. With the assistance of Collegiate Crossings, the young lady attended CU. Seeing the changes in his sister’s life, her brother decided to go back to school and attended Metro State University. From there, the oldest brother of these two students, who was in his 30’s and already had a child, and their mother both decided to return to school. That story is a true testament to just how much Collegiate Crossings is able to help these families, affecting them for generations to come.
As they look to the future, Collegiate Crossings hopes to be able to expand and continue to help students. Through COVID, they’ve been able to assist even more students who would not have had access to them through Zoom and other technologies. In Carey’s words, the most rewarding part of what they do is “seeing people’s lives change and knowing that we’ve set them up to have success. There is nothing better than when a kid gets accepted into a trade school, or a college, or goes into a job or into the military and we know that in their next several years they are going to get the education they need to pursue the career of their dreams. And what I love more than that is to know that we’re going to be making a generational change.”
Since their start in 2012, Collegiate Crossings has been able to assist many low income and first generation students. 100% of their low income students have been accepted to at least one school and 100% of them received some form of financial aid and/or scholarships. In 2022 alone, Collegiate Crossings students were awarded over $4.1 million in scholarships! We are so thankful for this opportunity to be able to partner with Collegiate Crossings and donate to these students to help them further their education. For more information on Collegiate Crossings or how you can donate, go to https://www.collegiatecrossings.com/.