Dear Friends,
In the context of our lives, a year is short. It’s a fraction of our time on this planet: a few hundred days, a single lap around the sun.
And yet some years are undeniably special.
For Mission Scholars, 2022 was special indeed. It was a year filled with moments of triumph too numerous to list. We’d like to share two of those moments with you.
One was our graduation ceremony in June. This event was already special, since it was a celebration of our Scholars’ dramatic success on the college-admissions front. Students in attendance were bound for schools like NYU, USC, UPenn, and UC Berkeley: all with significant scholarships, some with a full ride. But for us, what made this event unforgettable was the sheer pride on the faces of the parents in the audience—most of whom had not attended college themselves—as they imagined the extraordinary future that lay ahead for their children.
Another moment occurred later in the summer, during the official kickoff for our Leaders in Transition (LIT) program. This was a more pragmatic affair, focused on landing summer internships during college. It was exhilarating to watch our Scholars, decked out in business-casual, interacting with leaders from major companies like Amazon, Electronic Arts, AppFolio, and Cottage Hospital. As they listened to the executives share career advice, they were clearly envisioning themselves in similar roles someday.
That’s one upshot of our work that often goes unnoticed: while everything Mission Scholars does is geared toward practical results, the success our Scholars experience during this process often inspires them not just to work toward their aspirations, but to broaden them. We’ve seen it many times: the more our Scholars accomplish, the bigger their dreams become.
We have even bigger plans for the coming year. We’re expanding our next cohort to thirty juniors (triple the size of our first cohort). We’ll also begin recruiting high school sophomores so we can provide guidance earlier in our Scholars’ academic careers. And we are partnering with more local and national companies to connect our Scholars with career-building opportunities.
Nothing Mission Scholars has accomplished so far would have been possible without our donors and volunteers. We’ve come a long way, but there is still much to be done. Please consider investing in us as we continue to grow and change the lives of more students and families who dream of a higher education.
Right now, there is a rare opportunity to double the impact of your donation. Through the end of 2022, the Bliss Family Foundation has offered to match all donations up to $75,000.
As always, we are deeply grateful for your support.
