Over the years, we have highlighted important events and activities at Project MALES showcasing key individuals who make up the Project MALES familia in our semi- weekly website stories and in our Project MALES newsletter each fall and spring semesters. Here are some of the highlights we would like to share with you that we included in our Fall 2016 Newsletter.
Our first story introduces new members in our Project MALES staff for the 2016-2017 academic school year–we are happy to welcome five new staff members, Mike Gutierrez, Rodrigo Aguayo, Enrique Aguayo, Jorge Burmicky, and Pavitee Peumsang. Mike is the new Program Coordinator for Project MALES and will help lead the day-to-day operations for the Project MALES mentoring program. Rodrigo and Enrique are new MA graduate students in higher education here at UT Austin and will be mentoring site coordinators at our schools, and TA’s for our new two credit service-learning course. Jorge and Pavitee join the research team as Research Associates for Project MALES and the Texas Education Consortium for Male Students of Color. They are new PhD students also in the higher education program at UT. Our second story highlights our 2016 Texas Male Student Leadership Summit where over 450 young men of color and faculty, staff, and administrators from our partner institutions attended, representing independent school districts, community colleges, and universities from across the state of Texas. This year we expanded our student focus and introduced pre-Summit Student Interest Groups (SIG) featuring workshops on going to college and graduate school, and a Student Convening where we introduced students to the three themes of the Summit—Brotherhood, Leadership, and College and Career Readiness and added, for the first time, a session panel made up of student leaders from these institutions. We also introduced a new K-12 track for high school students, to add to our college student and professional tracks. Our third story introduces our inaugural Project MALES Summer Academy hosted by the Gus Garcia Young Men’s Leadership Academy on June 2016. The three-day Summer Academy was open to young men from Austin ISD middle and high schools. The first two days were held at Gus Garcia YMLA and the third day was held on the campus of UT-Austin. The Project MALES Summer Academy featured three days of workshops and sessions that focused on three themes— Brotherhood, Leadership, and College and Career Readiness. Activities focused on building leadership and team building skills, communication skills, creative writing and spoken word. Our fourth and final story announces a new three-year grant from The Kresge Foundation to advance our collective work through 2019 and beyond. This three-year grant will support the Consortium as we embark on a strategic planning process and will enable us to develop a sustainable model for our future work and continue to build capacity among our partner institutions to better serve boys and young men of color.
For more information, please visit our Project MALES and the Texas Education Consortium for Male Students of Color websites, http://diversity.utexas.edu/projectmales/ where you can find weekly updates about our work here at Project MALES. We thank all of our local, state, and national partners and allies for their support and look forward to building and growing our project to serve men of color in K-12 and higher education so they can achieve their academic and personal goals. For the full version of the fall newsletter click here.
