ÉXITO Title V Grant Program

A signature component of the ÉXITO grant is GateWay's new Center for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. This center works to create a just community college experience that values everyone's stories and backgrounds, and empowers students to achieve their personal, educational, and professional goals.

The DEI Center strives to create an inclusive and equitable campus environment by supporting identity exploration and development, while validating the diversity of our individual experiences, and facilitating educational dialogues across different identity groups. 

Within the Center for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion suite is the GateWay Art Gallery, which embraces the dynamic and multidisciplinary nature of today’s visual culture. The gallery features student, faculty and guest artist works from historically underrepresented backgrounds and subjects in order to provide students, educators and community members a vibrant space for interaction, reflection, experimentation and dialogue.

GateWay is committed to the success of its students by providing an environment conducive to teaching and learning. To ensure that every student takes full advantage of the educational opportunities, the College has implemented many action plans to help with retention and promote cognitive and affective skills, one of them being the Early Alert Action Plan.

The goal of the Early Alert Action Plan is to establish an Early Alert process for faculty and staff to assist students who are struggling in their class(es) early in the semester to prevent them from receiving a failing grade or entering into Academic Probation. 

Another action plan set in place is the Academic Probation Action Plan, which is meant to assist low-performing students who are struggling in their class(es) early in the semester to maintain good academic standing.

As well as offering personal support through holistic and comprehensive services, GateWay’s goal is to engage proactively with students and collaborate with multiple departments around the college to provide more personalized support. This will involve designing and facilitating success strategy workshops for students, relying on results of non-cognitive assessments taken during onboarding or using predictive analytics as appropriate.

Dropout Detective: We’ve integrated Dropout Detective into Canvas, our learning management system. This will allow us to proactively identify at-risk students by analyzing their performance across ALL courses in which they are enrolled. Administrators, advisors, and instructors have a view of their class dashboard, where all their students are given a risk index. This risk index is displayed in “stop-light” format (red, yellow, green) to draw attention to the most at-risk students. They can then drill into the individual student’s profile to determine the risk reasons and to develop a proactive plan of action to ensure that the student succeeds in their classes.

SingleStop: We’ve also integrated a software called SingleStop. Single Stop builds pathways out of poverty by leveraging partnerships and technology to connect people to existing resources, all through a unique one-stop shop. This software helps us to tap into the billions of dollars of life-changing resources that go unclaimed each year. Single Stop seeks to ensure that those resources reach the people who need them most, giving them access to safety net programs and providing a boost up the economic ladder. Connecting families to these resources is a problem of logistics, and solving it means moving millions of people toward economic security. Single Stop uses technology to create a new pathway for economic mobility in America. Our innovative approach leverages existing financial resources with opportunities for education, counseling, training, and support—a potent recipe for lifelong financial stability. Single Stopʼs Social Innovation Fund Award-winning technology and programmatic expertise build capacity for coalitions of service agencies, strengthening local communities.

GateWay Community College is committed to cultivating an environment of meaningful learning, engagement and connection, and to embracing an integrated and strategic approach to well-being for all through the collegewide implementation of the 5C’s of Well-Being Culture: Character, Care, Connection, Contribution and Career. 

GateWay is looking to increase well-being literacy for all of our community members by weaving well-being language and knowledge into teaching and learning, and creating opportunities for individuals to understand and mindfully construct well-being experiences. Well-being literacy enlarges our capability of choosing well-being and empowers us to intentionally practice in ways that improve and sustain our own flourishing, as well as that of others and the wider community.

In 2019, GateWay became the first Community College of Well-Being by creating and integrating a collegewide framework called the 5C’s of Well-Being Culture. Values for our commitment to well-being are framed around the 5C’s and include the following:

• Character: Develop authentic strengths of character that enable us to do and be our best
• Connection: Foster and maintain close positive relationships and a sense of belonging
• Care: Take care of our emotional, physical and financial wellness, and create a safe, inclusive and flexible environment to cultivate flourishing
• Contribution: Enable all community members to be a part of something bigger than ourselves and articulate a unique purpose for learning and for life
• Career: Provide knowledge and skills to make individual decisions that contribute to both career and life success

ÉXITO SILBA (Student Innovators for Local Business Action)

The ÉXITO SILBA program brings together a small group of GateWay students and pairs them up with a local Arizona business, in order to tackle current challenges faced by that business or organization.

ÉXITO On-Campus Internship

The ÉXITO On-Campus Internship pairs you up with a GateWay faculty member or staff. Our leaders will teach you a multitude of attributes, outside of just your skill set, that will help you become a better hiring candidate in any setting.

How it works:

• Students sign up for these paid internships, where they will apply classroom skills to real world business challenges.
• Sessions will be either hosted on campus by faculty or staff, and/or by actual business leaders in the community.
• Sessions can be hosted by leaders, either at their place of business or in the MakerSpace. A group of roughly 12 interns are coached and mentored through the process by faculty, the instructor, and the business.
• Staff coaches and mentors interns and takes responsibility for all logistics, HR, and other aspects of that internship.

For more info, please reach out to Adam Farni at adam.farni@gatewaycc.edu.

What previous student interns have to say about their ÉXITO MakerMatic adventure: