Strength in Numbers: Community-based Collaborations

Serving our state and greater Badger community has been the primary focus of the Office of Student Financial Aid’s Advising & Outreach team for the past four years.  Often times we serve students throughout their higher education selection process, regardless of whether or not they choose to attend UW–Madison.  However, throughout our time serving our community we’ve made countless friends and created lasting, impactful relationships with community based organizations that are mission aligned with us in our goal of helping students access, afford, and succeed at UW–Madison. Community based partners such as the various Boys & Girls Clubs around Wisconsin, All-In Milwaukee, and Wallin Education Partners out of the Twin Cities are well positioned to support students from their recruitment process to their graduation day and beyond.  Finding those partners, listening to their needs, and helping out when and where we are able are some of the best ways we can choose to invest our time in the Office of Student Financial Aid.  Our collective investments, on the community partner and UW–Madison side, are all the more impactful when we work together and create a strategy to maximize financial aid offers while offering complimentary wraparound support services. To highlight one of these partnerships, All-In Milwaukee seeks to serve highly talented, modest income students of color from the greater Milwaukee community, and they’ve been wildly successful in just their first two years of existence.  The Office of Student Financial Aid has been able to partner by maximizing each student’s individual financial aid offer when combined with the scholarship from All-In, while welcoming in All-In’s student support team who meets with students biweekly and offers monthly workshops that complement the existing suite of services afforded to our FASTrack, BANNER and Pell Grant recipients.  In a pandemic altered freshman year for All-In’s first cohort of 40 students overall, the retention and persistence rate was over 95%.  All twelve of their freshman class at UW–Madison during the 2019-2020 academic year are returning and are looking forward to welcoming in this year’s group of 27 freshman. The “All-In” playbook that has been created is steadily growing with additional partnerships around the division and across campus.  The Office of Admissions and Recruitment is now well positioned and at the ready to offer a more curated recruitment experience for All-In Milwaukee, the Center for Educational Opportunity is welcoming All-In students to offer additional, and always needed, wrap around advising supports, and the Student Success Through Applied Research Lab is beginning to study the ways in which we can continue to ensure the success of our All-In students.  We’re still a couple years away from our first cohort crossing the stage on graduation day, but it’s never too early to start thinking about internships and careers so the team at SuccessWorks has joined the effort to further support the work of All-In and our other community based organizations. In Financial Aid Advisor Joselyn Diaz-Valdes’ words, “Receiving the FASTrack or BANNER award offer is like winning the financial aid lottery.”  For students who are also working with our fantastic community based partners like All-In Milwaukee, they can win the higher education lottery multiple times over, and we here in the Office of Student Financial Aid are just happy to play our part to increase those chances for more students.