The day Loreal Latimer arrived at the U. of I., her parents dropped her off at Taft-Van Doren residence hall and drove away. Because she graduated fifth in her class at Chicago’s Corliss High School – while leading extracurricular activities and working 17 hours a week at a food service job – the Latimer family figured she could easily navigate a bucolic college campus.
But suddenly, she felt utterly lost.
“I didn’t know how to find my classes, what my meal plan consisted of or how I should go about buying books,” Latimer said. “My parents never went to college, so the transition was a little rough for me.”
Luckily for Latimer, she was part of Illinois Promise, a program established in 2005 by Richard Herman (the chancellor at the time and a former first-generation college student) to provide a college education for students who meet a strict set of income criteria, including family assets of less than $50,000. On her second day at the U. of I., Latimer attended an Illinois Promise orientation hosted by Susan Gershenfeld, the program’s student services director, and came away with all her questions answered, plus useful tips on accessing the multitude of campus resources. Latimer even got her own I-Promise mentor, Pat Justice, marking the beginning of a transformative relationship.
“She became my on-campus mother figure,” Latimer said. “I can talk to Pat about absolutely anything.”
Illinois was one of the first five schools in the nation to offer an “access scholarship” based on low income. There are now more than 50 similar programs nationwide, but the U. of I. is so far the only school that offers to pair access scholars with adult mentors. I-Promise students have the option of choosing a peer (student) mentor, or having no mentor, but most years, between 30 and 45 percent of incoming I-Promise students elect to have a mentor, Gershenfeld said. Of that number, only a third choose peer mentors. “By a two-to-one margin, they request adults,” Gershenfeld said.
On the surface, Latimer and Justice appear to have little in common. Justice, a retired campus administrator who serves as an adjunct faculty member for the College of Education, grew up in Evanston, on Chicago’s North Side; Latimer grew up on Chicago’s South Side. Justice is the oldest of three siblings; Latimer describes herself as the middle child among her nine siblings. But they quickly discovered that disparities in age and background didn’t matter.
“We sat and talked and we just clicked,” Justice said.
“I don’t realize our differences when we talk,” Latimer said. “I always learn from our conversations.”
Over the next four years, they met at least once a month, sometimes on campus, other times at Justice’s home, where Latimer liked to play with the family’s poodle, Aubry.
When Latimer fell ill during her freshman year, Justice picked her up from the hospital, supplied her with food and medicine, and soon instituted their annual tradition of getting flu shots together. When Latimer considered changing her major, Justice helped remove her doubts.
“I said, ‘Good! If the university is opening your eyes to new things, that’s what college is all about!’ ”
And when Latimer was asked to address the annual meeting of the U. of I. Foundation – as the only student speaker – Justice couldn’t have been more proud.
“Loreal is just a phenomenal public speaker,” Justice said. “Would you like to see the video?”
Justice and Latimer embody the kind of connection Gershenfeld envisioned in 2007, when the idea of establishing an Illinois Promise mentorship program first surfaced. The light bulb clicked on at a reception for I-Promise freshmen, where Gershenfeld met two students whose stories grabbed her.
“The fact that these two students were even here was inspiring,” Gershenfeld said. “It was remarkable that they even got to this campus, considering their hardships. And I thought: How are they going to make it here? It’s wonderful that they’re given this scholarship, but they need more than money to succeed.”
Her own background, as the child of parents who didn’t attend college, gave her empathy for other “first-gen” students. And with a master’s degree in social work focused on gerontology (she also has an MBA in nonprofit management), Gershenfeld understood the potential in intergenerational relationships. As she left the reception, she pitched her idea about a mentorship program to Ruth Watkins, the vice provost at the time. After a few months of research, Gershenfeld received the green light to build a support office for I-Promise students.
She began by taking randomly chosen I-Promise students to lunch and asking them what services they needed from the school. She eventually established a student advisory board, which soon developed into peer-mentoring and, by 2009, included an adult mentorship option. The ever-evolving program now includes a Registered Student Organization, and workshops on everything from academics to financial literacy to resume-writing to etiquette.
“Whatever the I-Promise students want, we try to make it happen,” Gershenfeld said. “Seventy percent of our students are first-gen, 80 percent are minority and 100 percent are low-income. Any one of those characteristics put students at risk for not graduating, and some of our students have all three risk factors.
“In addition to the support we provide, the students represent community for each other.”
For Latimer, the support helped her overcome the odds. “There are stats about how many students from Chicago public schools will graduate by age 25, and I think it’s about 8 percent,” she said. Latimer graduated on time – in May – and is now a teaching fellow at Urban Prep Academies’ Englewood Campus teaching a life skills and humanities course to young African-American men on Chicago’s South Side.
But lest anyone think Latimer was the sole beneficiary in the mentoring relationship, Justice argues otherwise.
“I was privileged to watch the transformation of a young woman just starting out. She just grew, she thrived, she blossomed, and I got to watch that happen,” Justice said. “Plus she helps keep me young. She and I have a pact: We are going to meet Beyoncé. Not just go to a Beyoncé concert – we are going to meet the woman.