College Visions

Adviser: Dr. Gao Niu, Student Consultants: Briana Beland '23, Gregory Farrell '22, Nathan Hochberger '23

College Vision's mission is to “empower low-income and first-generation college-bound students to realize the promise of higher education by providing advising and resources to promote college enrollment, persistence, and graduation. College Visions advances equal access to educational opportunities in historically under-served communities.”

Our student consultants are working with College Visions to create a model to predict student success. The ultimate goal is to identify variables linked to student success to better inform tutors/mentors and allow them to tailor their approach on a case-by-case basis.

The Nature Conservancy Maryland/DC Chapter

Adviser: Dr. Alicia T. Lamere, Student Consultants: Amanda Stedman '22 and Louise Offersen '23

The Nature Conservancy's mission is to “conserve the lands and waters on which all life depends. To achieve this, we must boldly address the biodiversity and climate crises over the next decade. By maximizing our ability to affect change between now and 2030, we can shape a brighter future for people and our planet.”

Our student consultants are working with TNC to characterize bias that exists in the distribution of funding resources. There are numerous grants and funding opportunities available for communities who seek to improve and protect their environmental resources. Conceptually, these opportunities should have the power to support and transform underserved communities. In practice, unfortunately, funding is often provided to communities with the resources to craft the most strongly phrased proposals rather than the most critical or impactful projects. This inherent bias can lead to propagating systems where the “winner takes all” and struggling communities continue to see decline. Our collaboration seeks to determine if language choices are contributing to this disparity. The hope is that changes can then be recommended to the way such solicitations are crafted in the future and to the methods used to evaluate the resulting proposals in order to ensure a more equitable distribution of resources.

Past Projects

Catholic Foundation of Rhode Island

Adviser: Dr. Alicia T. Lamere, Student Consultants: Audrey Chase '21, Chris Ethier '21, Jake Mingola '19, and Anthony Park '19

As their website states, "The Catholic Foundation of Rhode Island is a nonprofit corporation established to provide a means for individuals and organizations to ensure long-term financial stability for charitable, religious and educational institutions of the Diocese of Providence.”

Executive Director, Andrea Krupp, challenged our student consultants to assist her in creating a database for Catholic Foundations throughout the country. Her ultimate goal was to better understand donation trends--in the context of their organization and in relation to Catholic Foundations throughout the country--in order to grow and improve CFRI’s assets and resources. With our help, CFRI identified and implemented significant changes to their data collection methods to facilitate this goal.

We're always looking for new partnerships! Please reach out to Alicia Lamere for more information (alamere1@bryant.edu).