Lynn Tashiro, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, principal investigator for INSPIRE and Building Capacity and professor of physics at Sac State said it was not a discretionary grant that did not allow the university to utilize the funds how they wanted to.
“The one thing we agreed on is we wanted something for students,” Tashiro said. “Some of the options were advising programs and things like that. The one thing we agreed on is that jobs for students on campus was a huge retention bonus if we could combine the need to serve students with employing students on campus.”
As a result, the university put together the peer network, and that network was going to fund mini-grants to any entity on campus where students are serving other students, according to Tashiro. Half of the grant went into INSPIRE and the other half went towards getting data in the hands of project directors and faculty to help sort out where the systemic inequities are at Sac State.
“Technically you're not serving until you have that identity, until you have some evidence that you are indeed serving those students, so we wanted to actually achieve that,” Tashiro said. “So we did that through funding the peer programs for the students and also looking at our institutional data to look at equity gaps and other kinds of indicators that might show us where we are not providing equitable services.”
INSPIRE was the first expanding serving institution grant to get awarded, according to Tashiro.
Aside from these projects, there are other areas of support on campus for Latino students. Viridiana Diaz, associate vice president of strategic students support programs, oversees about nine centers and programs that serve many Latinos on campus. One of those programs is the college assistance migrant program, which is not funded through an HSI grant but is a federally funded program.
Due to the difficulty to outreach and recruit students, the college assistance migrant program reaches anywhere between three to 4,000 students in their high school presentations to about 90 rural schools in an effort to recruit many to Sac State.
“It brings a lot of students to Sac State that are from a Latinx background,” Diaz said. “Then, in addition to the recruitment piece which is very significant, we focus on first-year retention with those students and then integrating them into Sac State.”
The retention of students includes services such as the freshman seminar course, academic advising, personal counseling, career counseling and a leadership program that connects students to a mentor, according to Diaz.
Diaz also oversees the Dreamer Resource Center and the Serna Center. The DRC is designed to provide services that are not always offered by the university, according to Diaz, because undocumented students have unique needs that require support beyond academic. For example an immigration clinic on campus provides legal advice at no cost to students, staff and faculty who may need that support.