Shelby County requires more tnAchieves mentors than any county in Tennessee, and more than 600 mentors are still needed by November 30, 2018.
Keep reading to learn more, and sign up to serve by November 30!
tnAchieves is the partnering organization to the TN Promise Scholarship in 84 of the 95 counties in Tennessee. Their mission is to increase higher education opportunities for Tennessee high school students by providing last-dollar scholarships with mentor guidance.
A Note from tnAchieves Executive Director Krissy DeAlejandro:
With the mission of eliminating the barriers associated with entering the post-secondary pipeline, tnAchieves launched as a universal last-dollar community and technical college scholarship that paired students with volunteer mentors and required its students to complete at least 8 hours of community service each semester. The founders of tnAchieves understood that students, particularly at-risk students, need more than funding to complete college; therefore, tnAchieves offers a holistic approach to student access and success by providing wrap-around supports to students in an effort to increase Tennessee’s post-secondary attainment rate.
From 2008-2014, tnAchieves supported more than 10,000 students into a community or technical college with more than $15.5M privately raised exclusively for last-dollar student scholarships. Our statistics indicate that our students are retaining and graduating at a rate 50 percent greater than state averages. This is particularly important when you consider 65 percent of tnAchieves students are first generation college attendees and 70 percent come from families who earn less than $50,000 annually. Moreover, while the nation laments the student debt crisis, here in Tennessee we have identified a solution as 94 percent of our graduates reported they completed post-secondary debt free.
