The RFP for Stay the Course™ Replication is out! Please click here to view and download all application components.

All responses are due January 4, 2019 by 12 p.m. CST.

EXPERIENCE our results

At Catholic Charities Fort Worth (CCFW), it is our mission to eradicate poverty. One approach we've taken to accomplish our mission is to increase educational attainment for low-income students in our country through our Stay the Course™ program. We know that obtaining a certificate or degree in a growing industry is essential to securing a living-wage job, which is necessary in order for students to achieve self-sufficiency.

We have a completion crisis in our nation, with fewer than 40 percent of community college students obtaining a degree within six years. The numbers are even worse for low-income students, who are seven times more likely to drop out of school than their peers.

The first question is WHY? The second is HOW DO WE FIX THIS?

Stay the Course™ is a community college program created by CCFW and researched by the University of Notre Dame's Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) through a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT). Through our partnership with LEO, we are able to measure the impact of the program and how intensive case management and strategic emergency financial assistance can help low-income students enrolled in community college actually complete their certificate/degree and break their cycle of poverty.

The results of this intervention speak for themselves. After three years, Stay the Course™ students are two times more likely to stay in school and four times more likely to graduate than a comparison group. Among female students, the impact is even greater - 31.5% of female Stay the Course™ students had completed a certificate/degree after three years compared to almost no one in the comparison group.

We believe that Stay the Course™ can be a nationwide model for community college success and we need YOU to help us prove it.

When we made it CCFW’s mission to end poverty, one family at a time, we didn’t just mean for North Texas. We wanted to invest in research that would yield proven poverty-ending results in every single corner of America. Which is why we are absolutely thrilled to report that because of the amazing results we've seen from the Stay the Course™ program in North Texas, we are in the process of replicating this program in cities across our country. Through replication, we aim to test our theory that this program, when implemented with quality and fidelity to the model, can produce beneficial results for low-income students across our nation.

This November, CCFW will release a competitive Request for Proposals (RFP) seeking qualified non-profit organizations to replicate this program across the nation. If you're interested in finding out more about our program and being among the first to receive the RFP once it's live, please sign up below to be added to our distribution list.