Helping students to prepare for a brighter future.
Supporting individually meaningful education and preparation for rewarding work and financial stability.
Career and Education Access builds on its twenty-five year history of helping students to find their own path to a future career. We help students complete a program of technical training so they can begin a life of success and contribution to our community.
Our History
For over twenty-five years we operated, first as “John Marshall Dollars for Scholars” and then as “Bright Future Dollars for Scholars,” affiliated with Scholarship America with a mission of supporting youth in the Bright Future program.
The Bright Future program, created by its Executive Director, Reza Khastou, captures at-risk youth and engages them in workforce education programs that are meaningful to them, intensive, with a hands-on approach that fits their learning styles. Bright Future employs case management, to assure students stay on a path to success, and surrounds them with a community that gives them individual focus.
During our twenty-five years we have enabled hundreds of students who were not thriving in the standard, college-prep, comprehensive high school environment to chart their own paths to rewarding careers and financial stability.
Newly independent as Career and Education Access, we continue to meet students where they are, connect them to career assessment and guidance, aid them to identify resources that can help them succeed and provide just-in-time support to overcome the seemingly small obstacles that can derail students from their track to success.
Over time we have enabled hundreds of students to complete high school and career training and go on to become independent, contributing members of the community.
How We Work
We meet students where they are.
Students in their junior year in high school are sometimes unsure of their direction or even considering dropping out of a program that has little meaning for them. We help them, along with their parents, to assess their interests and abilities and to identify a career path that fits them best.
We help the students and their families identify resources, including scholarships and grants, and we help them apply for everything they qualify for.
We check in frequently, to make sure they are making progress. If they get off-track we help them evaluate their direction and get back to their plan.
We provide niche, just-in-time financial support for the unexpected obstacles that crop up, obstacles that can seem small to many of us but can be insurmountable to young people with few resources of their own.
We also help students who are already on their paths but who encounter those sudden challenges that can derail them from their plans.
We have provided lab fees, baby sitting charges, bus passes, uniforms, fees for cap & gown rentals, tool and equipment fees and we have paid for graduation photos. We react quickly so that a student doesn’t interrupt their progress, since an interruption can sometimes become a permanent derailment.
How we handle donations
All donations are added to an account to benefit students, as described above. Our board of directors is comprised of unpaid volunteers. We have modest administrative costs, principally for state registration, postage, insurance, and office supplies. Donors can be confident that their funds reach students effectively.
Contact
Feel free to contact us with any questions.
Email
Career.Education.Access@gmail.com