DENVER — The Prosperity Denver Fund is expanding its reach to include older students looking for financial help for college and students seeking other certifications.
“The goal is really threefold. One, it's to help the individual student to pursue their post-secondary pathways. College apprenticeships, career trades, have gotten very expensive. So, we're trying to help, particularly first generation students, low-income students, but Denver residents who want to pursue kind of their hopes and dreams,” said Theresa Peña, Prosperity Denver Fund vice chair. “Then the second one is a workforce opportunity. So how do we keep local talent in Denver? And as you know, Denver has gotten very expensive. And there's a huge need for kind of middle-income jobs, as well as professional jobs. So we want our Denver students to be able to stay, live and work in Denver.”
The Prosperity Denver Fund recently received approval from the Denver City Council to expand the number of students served.
“We had an age increase because of COVID. What we found is a lot of recent graduates had put off pursuing a post-secondary pathway, just because it was so hard to either go to school or to find a job. So, we raised the maximum age to receive a scholarship from 26 to 30 years old,” Peña said. “We also increased the opportunity to do certificates, trades, and apprenticeship. So we had some of that, but we really wanted to expand it. Because there's so much innovative work going on in Denver, that we want to ensure that our students had opportunities in what we call these middle-income jobs. And then we also had an opportunity to drop it down into K-12 student support services.”
Peña said 90% of students that benefit from the prosperity fund are students of color and 80% are the first ones in their family to pursue post-secondary certifications.
