SERVE
Intrusive Success
OneGoal, a community-based organization in Chicago, Illinois, makes postsecondary planning an intrusive part of students’ lives — something that is key to its success.
By Kenya McCullum
W hen former U.S. President Barack Obama spoke about the success of Caleb Na- varro during the College Opportunity Summit in 2014, OneGoal made na- tional headlines. That’s because the community-based organization had helped Navarro — a struggling teen from the west side of Chicago who went on to earn a doctor of pharma- cy degree — change his life through postsecondary education. In a way, with that moment in the national spotlight, OneGoal had gone full circle. The organization, which has helped countless students over the past 15 years, was founded because of a headline. In 2006, the Chicago Tribune ran a story about how only six out of every 100 students from Chicago pub- lic schools would earn a bachelor’s degree by the age of 25. According to Melissa Connelly, OneGoal’s chief executive officer who was a fifth- grade teacher in Chicago at the time, this was a stunning revelation for educators in the area. In fact, fel- low Chicago teacher Jeff Nelson was so astonished by this headline that
he knew he had to do something to address the problem. “Educators looked at that and thought, ‘What are we doing?’” said Connelly. “Just being that transpar- ent was a wake-up call to our entire school system, including my founder and predecessor, who at that time was teaching fifth grade five blocks away from where I was teaching fifth grade. And so the way Jeff, our
founder, tells this story is that head- line sparked something in him and he realized he needed to do more and figure out what happens after ele- mentary school and then what hap- pens after high school that creates this reality.” CREATING A NEW REALITY OneGoal was born to help cre- ate the reality Chicago educators
Participants at the OneGoal Student Summit in Metro Atlanta, which brought nearly 650 OneGoal high school juniors and seniors together in March 2024.
8 • THE JOURNAL OF COLLEGE ADMISSION
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