Mission Scholars

Nonprofits understandably like to make a big deal about anniversaries, noting with pride and gratitude how long they have been a part of the community and the ways in which they’ve adjusted their services to meet evolving needs. On the other hand, Mission Scholars hasn’t been around long enough to trumpet their decades of service, or even a single decade, having just notched six years since its founding in December 2018. 

Nevertheless, the nascent nonprofit has a reason to be celebrating in 2024, as Mission Scholars – which employs comprehensive college admissions guidance and financial aid expertise, mentorship and career development training to underrepresented low-income students in South Santa Barbara County – marked a major milestone earlier this year. Mission Scholars’ inaugural cohort of former high school students graduated from college this summer at the same time as its first full cohort of college-bound high-schoolers who started working with Mission Scholars as sophomores completed their secondary school education and headed off to universities and colleges. 

“One of the things that separates us from many of our peer organizations that provide college access support is that we don’t stop when our students actually go to college,” explained Executive Director Cassie Lancaster, who co-founded Mission Scholars with Director of Operations Katie Kinsella and Board Trustee Kim Phillips. “We’re with our students all the way through college graduation, and even beyond. So it was a very big deal for us that we graduated two cohorts – one in high school, the other in college – for the first time this year.”

The organization was founded to address the inequities in the local secondary school system that finds too many students in the community being left behind in pursuing higher education. More than half of the students in Santa Barbara’s public school district live below poverty level, and in 2021, only 41% of socioeconomically disadvantaged high school seniors in Santa Barbara graduated with the minimum requirements needed to enroll in a UC or Cal State university. Mission Scholars works to level the playing field by providing cadres of high-performing yet disadvantaged students access to the same level of support that their wealthier peers receive. 

With a background in a private company offering college admissions counseling, Lancaster had first-hand experience with the disparities, while Phillips had seen similar issues in her work in test prep. 

“As we built our practices, we saw the increasing need for this guidance to be available to a larger group of students, particularly those who couldn’t afford it,” Lancaster said. “Personally, at first I had no idea about how significant those barriers were for students from low-income families. Once I realized it, I just couldn’t ignore it.” 

So the founders created a pilot program for a small group of high school seniors who would be the first in their families to attend college. 

“They deserved every level of comprehensive support that we had proven in our private practices, so we basically took everything we knew how to do and turned that into a program,” she said. “When they went off to college the following fall, we built a college success program to respond to their needs in navigating as first-generation students, slowly building a pretty robust college success program. Then we also began to work backwards as our organization got more successful, recruiting students who were younger than high school seniors, starting instead to work with them as sophomores.” 

Nowadays, each high school Mission Scholar receives academic and extracurricular advising to strengthen their college admission candidacy; individualized guidance on college entrance exams (e.g. SAT prep), workshops and individual coaching sessions through every step of the college application and essay process; an individualized scholarship plan to ensure a full free ride or at least make a four-year college experience more affordable, including guidance on all required financial aid forms, plus financial literacy workshops and budgeting advice. The organization can boast that 95 percent of that small cohort that just graduated from college received full scholarships. 

To combat the fact that only 11% of first-generation college students graduate by age 24, Mission Scholars also benefit from college transition workshops including academic study skills; professional development workshops; individualized summer internship matching opportunities with local and national corporations; access to career advisors and panels; and a volunteer college coach to provide mentorship throughout college.

It’s the last part that is especially meaningful for Lancaster in a full-circle moment. 

“The college graduates from our pilot program are now returning to mentor and conduct workshops and inspire our younger scholars,” she said. “That was our original vision, and it’s actually happening. To see these alumni of our program come back and lead workshops and mentor the younger students is incredible when we look back at the beginning – it was the three of us with an idea, doing all the work, conducting all the workshops. Being able to see the organization grow from 10 students to over 160, and watching them grow as leaders of the organization and mentoring the younger scholars is so thrilling. It’s what drives us.”