Women's Leadership Project: Gardena High School WLP Student Receives Prestigious College Scholarship

Sunday, October 27, 2013

Gardena High School WLP Student Receives Prestigious College Scholarship

Betsy Casas, a 4.0 GPA student at Gardena High School in Los Angeles, is a finalist in the prestigious QuestBridge scholarship program. QuestBridge provides low income, high achieving students with full four year scholarships to leading colleges and universities of their choice. QuestBridge partner colleges include Ivy Leagues like Yale, Princeton and Stanford. Betsy is a former foster care youth who wants to pursue a degree in environmental science. Her top college choice is Stanford University and she will be the first in her family to go to college. According to QuestBridge, “Over 84% of high achieving low-income students don’t even apply to top colleges and 44% don’t go to college at all.”

For the past two years, Betsy has participated in the Women’s Leadership Project mentoring program, a feminist humanist civic engagement initiative that provides first generation young women of color with community leadership and public speaking opportunities while preparing them for college. In addition to QuestBridge, WLP alumni have received scholarships from the prestigious Posse Foundation and Horatio Alger Foundation. QuestBridge scholarship recipients are notified of their college admission status in December.

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Women's Leadership Project

The Women’s Leadership Project (WLP) is a feminist service learning program designed to educate and train young
middle and high school age women in South Los Angeles to take ownership of their school-communities. Since 2006 WLP
has been based at South L.A. high schools like Gardena and Washington Prep High School. Using a humanist curriculum with a social justice lens, the goal of the program is to empower young women of color to develop their own voices, increase their self-esteem, foster healthy relationships, promote critical consciousness about and activism around race, gender, and LGBT equality, and prepare for college and careers. WLP guides young women through public advocacy
projects of their own choosing, toward helping them develop and sharpen their critical thinking, writing, organizing and leadership skills. This year's cohort has been accepted to several UC and Cal State campuses in addition to out-of-state
colleges like Syracuse University and the University of Oregon and won prestigious awards such as the Horatio Alger and Posse Foundation scholarships.