For Immediate Release:
GENERATION HOPE ANNOUNCES INAUGURAL HOPE 2024 CONFERENCE DEDICATED TO CREATING ECONOMIC MOBILITY FOR STUDENT PARENTS THROUGH HIGHER EDUCATION
WASHINGTON ⸺ May 17, 2023 ⸺ Nonprofit Generation Hope announced today they will host their inaugural national conference, HOPE 2024: Where Change Happens for Student Parents & Families, on March 13 - March 15, 2024 at the New Orleans Marriott in New Orleans, LA. As the organization continues to champion inclusivity and support for student parents, the HOPE 2024 conference will convene advocates, policymakers, higher education leaders, youth practitioners, and student parents dedicated to dismantling systemic hurdles that prevent this population from earning postsecondary credentials and moving into family-sustaining careers.
“Beyond our direct support of young parents in college, we wanted to broadly address the issues parents and families face by partnering with education leaders, changemakers, and students to sustainably transform the higher education sector and the traditional approach to economic mobility,” says Nicole Lynn Lewis, Founder and CEO of Generation Hope. “Our technical assistance program, FamilyU, has become a trusted and impactful resource for higher education institutions and student parents across the nation. We are excited to expand that impact with the launch of our first-ever national conference to further build awareness and collaborations that result in real change for families.”
Launched in 2021, Generation Hope’s FamilyU technical assistance program was created to increase awareness of the student-parent population enrolled at select institutions, enhance institution-wide student-parent work while engaging various departments and key stakeholders, improve data collection methods and tools to track the parenting status of enrolled students better, and more. Through their FamilyU initiative, Generation Hope is transforming the higher education field through a multi-facilitated approach by engaging institutional teams and providing them with peer learning convenings and campus-focused independent coaching sessions. The HOPE 2024 Conference is an extension of this work, strengthening the national ecosystem of student parent champions.
There are more than 4 million parenting students enrolled in college nationwide, and more parents would enroll in college if there were systems and support in place to help them succeed. Despite working hard, making sacrifices to secure a better future for themselves and their children, and being highly motivated to graduate college, a myriad of hurdles block their paths to completion. Student parents, who are disproportionately students of color, face greater economic barriers than students without children. Over two-thirds of student parents live in or near poverty, and student parents have higher levels of unmet financial need and higher median student debt.
Generation Hope is committed to removing those roadblocks through direct support for student parents and a national approach that creates systemic change through public policy and institutional transformation. The HOPE 2024 Conference serves as an opportunity for higher education leaders, advocacy organizations, policy partners, and student parents themselves to join together to explore the issues that affect student parents and the solutions for improving success rates in the classroom and beyond.
Generation Hope believes in the promise, power, and ability of student parents to create a better future for themselves and their community. For more than a decade, they have been dedicated to changing the statistics that fewer than 2% of teen mothers earn a college degree before the age of 30 and more than half of all parenting college students leave school without a degree. Since 2010, Generation Hope has worked directly with more than 300 young parents in college and has celebrated nearly 150 degrees earned.
To learn more about Generation Hope and the HOPE 2024 Conference, please visit generationhope.org.
Media Contacts:
Dreena Whitfield
908-588-2602
dreena@whitpr.com
Brionna Miller
973-861-3554
brionna@whitpr.com
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About Generation Hope
To ensure all student parents have the opportunities to succeed and experience economic mobility, Generation Hope engages education and policy partners to drive systemic change and provides direct support to teen parents in college as well as their children through holistic, two-generation programming. @supportgenhope