First-Gen Chisme

First-Gen Chisme focuses on providing first-generation and low-income students with post-secondary educational resources. It is centered on community-focused solutions intersected with art/design, culture, and education to support a first-gen community.

According to the Education Advisory Board (EAB), 33% of first-generation and low-income students leave college within three years of starting. Some of the main reasons first-generation students leave are due to three main reasons: financial burdens, lack of support and inequitable access to resources. This issue continues to exist because there are not enough community-focused initiatives centered around supporting first-gen and low-income students within many Public Title I high schools. Title I schools identify students that are most in need of educational, academic and financial support. They are often located in low-income communities and education public school districts that do not have enough funding resources to support their student bodies. These factors are often contributed by the historical injustices and environmental displacement many communities of color have historically faced in the United States. As students continue their own paths in postsecondary education, it is apparent that institutions need to do a better job of developing built-in first-gen focused programs intended to support needed students throughout their education. We can not continue living in a world where education is only accessible to those that have the economic needs and privileges to pursue it. All students, regardless of their background, should have the opportunity and ability to graduate and get a degree that helps support their future. As I pursued my studies as a first-gen and low-income student myself, I realized the discrepancies many of us faced as we embarked on our college journeys. Especially within my hometown in Kansas City, KS, where there are hundreds of first-gen, low-income, and students of color ranging from all cultural backgrounds in the area. Many students also identify as being first-generation American where they come from family immigrant backgrounds, primarily from Latin America. This inspired the intersections of art/design, education, culture, and community to play a role in the way youth can feel empowered and represented. 

First-Gen Chisme aims to provide community-focused solutions in supporting first-gen, low-income, and students of color because it utilizes the intersections of design, culture, and education to create a much needed first-gen community both through ed-tech solutions and direct-community events. Students feel represented within the content and work that we produce because it follows our motto, "By First-Gen, For First-Gen". We focus on supporting student experiences by connecting them directly with the many stories, voices, and advice from current first-gen college graduates and students to build an engaging community. It follows a mentorship module that allows for personalization to occur throughout a community. Additionally, our web service allows for students to engage in nation and local-wide educational resources that are designed with culture in mind to encourage an engaging experience when learning about post-secondary education. Students love the vibrancy, fun, and creative tech-smart solutions we offer and continue coming back because they tell us personally that, "It's fun to see the graphics of an ice-cream I would get at the store and then learn about college at the same time". We use the first-gen cultural experience as a way to illustrate the educational resources needed within our first-generation community. Additionally, we hope to expand further on the potential partnerships that First-Gen Chisme can build across local communities, non-profits, and institutions that help support various first-gen focused work detailed to specific areas. Currently, our work is centered around supporting many Kansas City specific communities and we hope to use our work within our own community to showcase how this can be accomplished across the United States in many cities also populated by first-gen and low-income students. 

The target customers within the venture are first-gen, low-income,
and students of color. Especially students with educational
backgrounds of attending a Title I high school that focuses on
helping disadvantaged students meet state academic content and
performance standards. Our organization specifically focuses on
high-school (juniors/seniors) and college students (all years).
Additionally, I am hoping to target first-generation high school/college
initiatives across predominately Hispanic serving institutions. We
hope to build partnerships with college-bound, first-generation
offices, faculty, and initiatives across the United States to help
support their student body and create collaborative programs
centered to focus on their local-needs within their communities. What
a first-gen student might need in California can be very different than
what a first-gen student in Missouri might need. We are hoping to
build upon these partnerships to build relationships across the
United States that helps personalize and locally focus on the needs
of first-gen students within their dedicated communities. The current community we are working with is located in Kansas City, KS. Many of these students come from Latinx and immigrant backgrounds. They are often the first of their family to be born and raised in the United States stemming from immigrant family members from Latin America. Our solution primarily serves the Latinx first-gen experience because it is one we are most focused in within our Hispanic-populated community. However, we often work across various student backgrounds to support non-Latinx students from marginalized backgrounds as well.

Being the eldest Latina daughter of immigrant and undocumented
parents comes with its own pressures. I am the first in my family to
attend college and I knew it was not going to be easy. As the eldest, I
have my younger sibling and many younger cousins looking up to
me and my own education journey. As I stepped foot into my first
year of college, I realized how challenging it was to be a space where I
did not feel represented and was not academically prepared for. I
truly did not know what it meant to be 'first-gen' until I began my
college career. I connected with many of my first-gen friends and
realized that my experience was not alone, we were all not prepared
and were emotionally, physically, and mentally drained. Even some of
my closest friends in college dropped out because it became too
much. This is when I had enough, I needed to find a way to support
the upcoming generation of first-gen students within my community
and beyond. I believe that there has to be better ways to provide
needed resources across marginalized neighborhoods and school
districts in America that suffer with the same educational inequalities.
I began to utilize my arts/design and community organizing
background to create a website that shares resources with my
community in Kansas City. It began to grow and I had no idea it would
lead me to be the non-profit I dream to make happen in the future. My background in Architecture helps support my community-driven work with First-Gen Chisme as I am passionate about advocating for a space that tends to the needs of marginalized communities. I enjoy being able to be a part of creative community-focused solutions that help establish programming, spaces, and designs that support marginalized individuals for the better. In my future as an aspiring Latina architect, I envision to establish First-Gen Chisme as a non-profit that can help merge my passions in architecture, community, culture and education within my community in Kansas City and working both locally and globally across various scales.

First-Gen Chisme was founded in 2020 where most of our work was virtual and began as a passion project. We connected virtually with students by building up our resources on the website and collaborating closely with a Kansas City, Missouri non-profit, Latino Arts Foundation, to create college readiness and art workshops for local students. In the summer 2021, we pursued the Brown University B-Lab Venture Accelerator and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Maharam STEAM Fellowship. During the B-Lab Venture Accelerator, we worked closely with a cohort of student to establish an educational mobile app dedicated to building a first-gen community through the access of educational resources on mobile. Students would be able to access this app in a creative user-experience similar to our current website that integrated culture and education to create an engaging community for first-gen Latinx students to feel represented by. Additionally, during the RISD Maharam Fellowship, we partnered with the Kansas City, Kansas Public School District to raise gun-violence awareness through their initiative, 'Enough is Enough'. The Kansas City community for many years has suffered with youth gun violence where over 23+ student lives have been lost because of issues of gun violence. By partnering with the school district, we raised awareness by producing bilingual infographics on gun violence advocacy. Additionally, we supported the community by gifting free school supplies in three different back-to-school fairs and helped vaccinate immigrant families during a high-rise of COVID cases. Today, we have partnered with the non-profit organization located in Providence, RI, Project Open Door, to help 20 students of their cohort with college readiness materials. We have also continued to upgrade our content and programming as we are working closely with Gaby Gonzalez as the 2023 MIT Solv[ED] Venture Micro-Grant awardee. This award will help fund academic and creative arts projects centered in supporting first-gen students for the school year 2022-23. 

The problem my venture is solving is the the inequitable access of

post-secondary education resources that many first-generation, low-
income, and student of colors face upon graduation from high

school. When students from marginalized communities attend
college they are more likely to drop out because of the inability to find
community, struggling with finances, academic issues, and other
conflicts. These are created as a result of not having the college
readiness that many of their non first-gen peers did have in high
school. Nationally in the United States, there is a 89% of first-gen and
low-income students that drop out of college within five years without
a degree. This issue continues to exist because there is not enough
focused support on first-gen students within many public Title I high

schools. Many college - especially private - need better built in first-
gen focused programs support these students through their

education. We can not continue living in a world where education is
only accessible to those that have the economic needs and
privileges to pursue it. All students, regardless of their background,
should have the opportunity and ability to graduate and get a degree
that helps support their future.

One of my many impact goals for First-Gen Chisme is to be able to reach and connect with amazing mentors who understand our mission and vision. It is essential for us to stay connected with professionals who truly believe in our work and our dedicated in helping us build a meaningful and impactful mentee and mentor exchange. Additionally, I hope to continue in elevating our content both in English and Spanish to get people excited about the possibilities of how our services greatly benefit the first-gen community both in terms of engagement and care as well. Creativity and culture are essential, especially within the Latinx community, which is why I hope to continue in getting our content to reach levels that speak to the hard work and dedication we put into our craft. I also hope to build a strong foundation on how our solutions are meaningful and easily translatable both in design, language, and in business. Everyday we continue to learn how to best describe our work to various individuals and we hope to really elevate our pitch and build a strong foundation to continue in applying to opportunities like these that can help us grow.

In all honesty, our technology is very basic. We are currently using an online website platform that allows us to creatively control our content in both Spanish and English. We hope to expand further into the ed-tech mobile app technology that we often test, sketch, and design using our web browser and online app functions. We participated in using this type of technology during our participation of the Brown University B-Lab Accelerator and are hoping to continue in working upon it. Our big plan too within this academic year, and thanks to the MIT Solv[ed] micro-grant, we are hoping to move our content to an html/css web browser such as cargo.site, that can help elevate our content and create a more engaging data source for our community to enjoy. These are essential to our mobile and web-tech online services. In terms of technology through architecture, we use Rhino and various 3D-modeling and rendering software's to help us re-imagine the possibilities of First-Gen Chisme. Especially as we help integrate architecture and design more within our work, it has become essential to the way we build community and help others learn about the field as well.

According to our online statistics from our web service, Wix.com, we have received over 3000+ site visits throughout our online website start in early 2021. The states of popularity include: Kansas, Rhode Island, Texas, California, Arizona, Illinois and Michigan. We have been able to connect with visitors of our site across the nation by sharing our website browser in first-generation driven Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn community pages. This has helped us gain traction and reach a larger audience outside of our local scale. Our main focus as always been the Kansas City, Kansas, community. We have expanded to the Providence, Rhode Island, community through partnerships in local organizations such as Project Open Door. In Kansas City, we reached about 500+ community members in the 2021 summer during our partnerships and direct-community events. We then have collectively reached around 15-25 students per semester both in Kansas City and in Providence since the school academic year of 2021. Our scale of reach often shifts, however, I would say collectively we have reached a little over 5000+ people stemming from both our local community in Kansas City, Providence, and our website users across the nation that have heard about us. In the next year, we hope to establish more organized relationships with local non-profits to build generational relationships across states. We hope to reach at least 150 students for one academic year and about 250+ community members in the duration of a summer. For our website services, we hope to continue growing in achieving an average of 1000+ visitors for our annual visitation web platform. 

Financial reasons as well as lack of mentorship. However, currently we are working on this with my current mentors and advisors. As well as we often do not know what are next steps that need to be taken our how to best utilize our given time. We hope that an opportunity like this can help us stay on top of our designated tasks and goals as we continue to work on our venture for the betterment of our community.

Kansas City Public Schools

Currently we are not making revenue from our organization as it
currently all of our resources and events are free to use and attend.
However, we are hoping to working upon developing a sustainable
business model within the fellowship that helps support our vision. We do have ideas on our business model that is rooted in support
from institutional partnerships, educational grants, and merchandise
earnings. Through our work, we hope to connect with institutions
both in high schools and colleges that can help support our work
within various communities in the United States. These partnerships
will create an understanding of the localized needs of a community
that First-Gen Chisme can help support with through collaborations,
content, peer-to-peer mentors and more. There will be a service fee
that institutions will have to provide for our venture with to financially
support our employees and artists upon our work. Additionally, there
will be web and mobile-tech services that students can access that
can generate ad revenues when possible. And finally, although we
love community organizing and are passionate about education, we
are also artists and designers! We hope to create merchandise,
stickers, journals, and other materials that can generate revenue for
our organization and share our visuals throughout the community.

Our market strategy starts off with working upon driving efficiency
within our ed-tech web and mobile solutions. We want to make sure
that the content that we are currently producing and the partnerships
we are working on and have worked on are documented and shared
to communicate the impacts we have had and continue to have.
Second is building upon our team of dedicated individuals
passionate for first-gen education support. This team will consist of
educators, students, and designers that can help with the growth of
this venture. Next is, thinking through our business model with clarity
through a deep analysis of our competitors and ways that they have
succeeded and failed working within first-gen communities. Next, is
working upon establishing a business model based off this research
that can help create our our business model of our future potential
partnerships with high schools and institutions and how it can utilize
various revenue growth based off different packages, outcomes, etc.
Education is supported by data and statistics, which will be important
to recognize as it will be essential to create a structure that illustrates
the impact our organization has had to develop a marketing strategy
to outreach institutions at a larger scale. Additionally, thinking about
the roles needed in order to make this happen and how this can
occur at both a local and larger scale throughout the work that we do.
I do hope to work upon this within the fellowship and learning more
ways to improve it further.