As the seasons change and we embrace an incredible opportunity for change as a country, Enroot is also celebrating a number of changes and firsts in our own community. We were sad to say goodbye to our amazing Director of Development and Strategic Initiatives, Dananai Morgan, and so grateful for all her contributions to our organization and our students. Over the summer we welcomed 5 fantastic new team members, including our new Program Manager, Vania Loredo, our Tisch Fellow, Shariqa Rahman, and our new AmeriCorps fellows, Ayla Wallace, Cassidy Alford and Regina Carey. We also welcomed 5 outstanding new members to our Board of Directors, all of whom are people of color and first or second generation immigrants, and who will strengthen our Board’s capacity in countless ways. We are thrilled this includes a second Program Alumnus joining our Board. We held our first “Enroot Celebrates Immigrant Leaders” event, featuring a deeply inspiring panel, moving performances by U-Meleni Mhlaba-Adebo, and the awarding of the first Enroot Annual Award for Immigrant Leadership to Alazar Ayele, Manager of Biogen’s Community Lab. Most importantly, our students have been thrilled to connect (or reconnect!) with their mentors, tutors, internship supervisors, Enroot staff, and each other as we kick off our first school year of virtual programming!
Thank you for your steadfast support of the Enroot family!
Ben Clark
Executive Director
Kicking Off a Virtual Year!
In this past week, all cohorts of our high school programming kicked off the year with their virtual mentoring nights. At each of these kick off nights, new students met their mentors for the very first time and returning student-mentor pairs we're reconnected after the summer. Here's what one student shared in excitement for being part of Enroot this year:
The College Success program hosted Enroot’s first ever virtual match night on the evening of September 23rd, for the 58 students participating this year. We connected 50 new mentor-students pairs and created a space for continuing matches to meet again! Students and mentors had a fantastic time playing Enroot’s version of the newlywed game, called “mentor-mentee trivia”. Students championed questions like: “what is your mentor’s weird food combination?” and “Does your mentee have siblings, and how many?”.
New this year! College Success is starting Monthly Mentoring Nights to bring our community of students and volunteers together. We hosted our first Monthly Mentoring Night on October 7th, complete with a time-management activity in pairs and a competitive game of pictionary in groups! The best part of the night was an impromptu jam session between two students who treated us all to live music on their drums and guitar. We are looking forward to the rest of our mentoring sessions!
Dag and Luben's jam session during our first College Success Mentoring Night!
Returning Volunteers Night!
We had an amazing time reconnecting with our volunteers who are ready to start this academic year. Volunteers had the opportunity to brainstorm ideas on how to support their students virtually and things that can make their online experience much smoother. We are excited to see how these amazing ideas come to fruition in the next few months.
This year, our volunteer program has gone virtual and nationwide! We have accepted volunteers outside of Massachusetts, who will be supporting our students during this academic year. Because of the timeline and the changes, we are still in the process of matching new volunteers with students. While this has taken longer than expected, we believed that supporting students’ transitions to virtual learning was the main priority.
This year we redesigned our volunteer trainings to put a much greater emphasis on equity and cultural consciousness. We expanded our cultural consciousness training from one stand-alone session to a series of 4 workshops. The purpose of these trainings is to guide our volunteers to lean in to challenging conversations about identity, privilege, and power. We believe that having an equity training series for this year is crucial for the development of more inclusive spaces for our students, and more successful relationships between students and volunteers.
Enroot Celebrates Immigrant Leaders!
On October 22, 2020, Enroot celebrated first and second-generation immigrant leaders and their essential contributions to advancing the movement for racial equity and the response to the COVID-19 crisis. 'Enroot Celebrates Immigrant Leaders' included performances by the amazing U-Meleni Mhlaba-Adebo, followed by a panel featuring Betty Francisco, Michel Bamani, Yvette Modestin, and Chirfi Guindo. 120 community members joined us for this virtual event and were able able to engage in the incredibly rich dialogue our panelists fostered by bringing their vulnerable and authentic lens to each question. We also had the distinct pleasure of honoring Alazar Ayele with the inaugural Enroot Annual Award for Immigrant Leadership in recognition of his incredible and tireless work advancing STEM learning for young people, particularly students like ours, for whom he is a great role model. Listen to U-Meleni’s beautiful performances and our panelists unique advice for immigrant students here:
Thank you to our ALL STAR team of Enroot staff, Dananai Morgan, Lima James, Natasha Karunaratne, and Ben Clark for all the hard work putting this event together. And thanks to our sponsors - Biogen, Google, William Blair, Hunton Andrews Kurth, Microsoft New England, and East Boston Savings Bank for making this amazing night possible.
Welcome to the Team!
We are so excited to welcome our new Program Manager, Vania Loredo, our Tisch Fellow, Shariqa Rahman, and our amazing Massachusetts Promise Fellows, Ayla Wallace, Cassidy Alford, and Regina Carey to the team!
Enroot is thrilled to welcome five amazing new leaders to our Board of Directors! Nora Gay, Mahlet Aklu, Bulbul Kaul, Khushbu Webber, and Sameer Ahmed are each incredibly inspired, and inspiring, leaders, who will have an enormous impact on the strength of our Board, the direction of our organization, and ultimately the lives of our students, past, present and future.
In addition to their many talents and accomplishments, we are excited to be welcoming more Board members who can relate to the immigrant experience through their own, and their families’, experiences, and who share core aspects of their identity with our students. Their commitments to advancing Diversity, Belonging, Inclusion and Equity in their own workplaces and communities will help accelerate our own efforts to become an anti-racist and inclusive organization. We are especially excited that Nora Gay will become the second Enroot program alumus to join our Board, bringing essential first-person alumni perspective to each and every Board conversation. We’re grateful to welcome Nora back to Enroot and look forward to welcoming more alumni to the Board in future years.
Below are brief bios introducing each new member. To read more about them, check out our website.
Thank you Nora, Mahlet, Bulbul, Khushbu and Sameer for your dedication to Enroot’s mission advancing educational equity for immigrant students and welcome to the Enroot Board of Directors!
Stay Tuned for Our Video Campaign!
In the coming weeks we’ll be launching our first ever video campaign, with students, volunteers, our team, and our board sharing why they choose to be part of the Enroot community! We would love for you to be one of the people to help us achieve our goal of raising funds to support our work with Enroot students. Stay tuned and be sure to tell us why YOU are inspired to be a part of the Enroot community and support immigrant youth!
Enroot is a nonprofit dedicated to empowering immigrant youth to achieve academic, career, and personal success through inspiring out-of-school experiences.
