We are building a world where every student in foster care gets a good education, believes in their ability and potential, and is connected to people who support their dreams.
This report is dedicated to the memory of Najee Barnes-Lassiter, who passed away on January 5, 2023 due to complications from a rare genetic condition called Danon disease. Najee was beloved by everyone who knew him, a proud graduate of Bronx Collegiate Academy and Bronx Community College, and a devoted grandson to his Nana, Kim. We will close this report with a letter to Najee from Ashia Troiano, who had the privilege of being his tutor with At the Table for the past several years.
Najee’s Nana has requested that we share information about Danon Disease in the hopes of raising awareness of this condition. Read more about Danon Disease here: https://www.danonfoundation.org/understanding-danon.
At the Table
“We see our students as whole people. We make space for their non-academic needs and goals, recognizing that education is one component of our students’ long-term thriving.”
- At the Table’s Statement of Values
To At the Table’s staff, students, and supporters:
While At the Table is an education-focused organization, it is also a community of people who are fiercely committed to recognizing, respecting, and uplifting the essential humanity of everyone around us. This past year, the third year of At the Table’s history, was a reaffirmation of that commitment.
Seeing students as whole people means figuring out how to support the parts of their lives that take place outside the classroom. This is some of the most important work that we get to do, and we are persistently honored and awed by the trust students place in us when they bring us into some of their hardest challenges, whether they’re navigating parenthood, struggling with their health or mental health, or figuring out where to live or how to make ends meet while attending school. From the beginning of At the Table, we have been training and coaching staff to give space and validate students’ feelings, help develop creative solutions to their challenges, and refer them to peer organizations for support we can’t provide. We have also come to recognize the limitations in the current landscape of referral opportunities; in too many cases, we’ve encountered situations where the resources our students need don’t exist, or have eligibility criteria that exclude our students, or wouldn’t arrive in a timely fashion.
This year, we decided to start filling in these gaps ourselves, expanding our programming to directly support students with a wide range of extracurricular challenges. At the beginning of FY23, we launched an emergency fund that gave away over $20,000 to pay tuition balances, utility bills, housing and food costs, and personal supplies. In March 2023, we hired a College Access Advisor whose job description reflects our understanding of the resources needed to truly
At the Table
access college; she provides not only admissions and re-enrollment support, but also assistance with securing health or mental health care, resolving issues with benefits, and finding housing.
Seeing students as whole people also means honoring what the college journey signifies to them. Much research has been done on the economic rewards of earning a college degree, which are considerable and easy to represent numerically: a degree returns hundreds of thousands of dollars, potentially, over the course of a person’s lifespan. And while this is a straightforward fact to hold, and reflects a wish for financial stability that so many of our students share, we believe that college means so much more to the students that At the Table serves.
For so many of At the Table’s students, college is not just a way of maximizing future earnings, but a rite of passage, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pursue knowledge for its own sake, or a chance to show others - younger siblings, friends, fellow youth in foster care - that they can achieve anything they set their mind to.
I think about a longtime student of ours, who had immense family commitments including caring for her own child as a single parent as well as several of her younger siblings, who summed up what college meant to her by pointing out that of all the things she had to do in her day, “this is just for me.” I think about the confidence that we hear in students’ voices as they figure out a homework problem they initially thought they were never going to get. I think about the pride that students feel when they complete their degree, which radiates from each and every graduation picture.
I hope that in this report, you see not just the ways that we support students toward their degree goals, but the ways in which we create community, show care, and honor the personal experiences of students as they navigate these crucial years of their lives.
Yours,
Michael Zink Executive Director, At the Table
Tutoring & Advising
At the Table partners with current and aspiring college students who have experienced foster care in defining and realizing their educational goals. We accomplish this by connecting students with full-time tutors and advisors who offer comprehensive, long-term academic support and college advising within working relationships characterized by equal partnership and mutual trust.
Growth and New Tutors
FY23 was a year of growth for At the Table; we began the year with a 5-person team able to tutor 65 students and ended with an 11-person organization capable of comprehensively supporting up to 125 students at one time. Along the way, we refined our recruitment and interview processes for new tutors, creating a well-defined rubric and scoring system for the simulated tutoring sessions we conduct with all of our final-round candidates to ensure that every tutor we hire can deliver outstanding instruction and all-around support from day one.
Thanks to our improved processes, and the deep talent pool from which we draw (we receive more than 90 resumes on average for each tutor posting), At the Table’s tutoring team is full of dynamic educators with a diverse array of talents and academic interests. Of the new tutors who joined our team this past year, 3 held degrees in STEM fields, including 2 in math, our most-requested subject, and 1 in biology and chemistry, which is especially
Tutoring & Advising
crucial for our many students who aim to earn degrees in healthcare-related fields. Another holds a law degree. See here for bios for all of At the Table’s staff.
Who We Served
We believe that every student deserves our support. We do not require any student to demonstrate their worth - via their academic performance, demeanor, or otherwise - in order for us to work with them.
- At the Table’s Statement of Values
Anyone who has been in foster care for even a day at any point in their life is eligible for At the Table, so long as they are in college or planning to attend within the next year. We do not have an age limit, recognizing that learning is a lifelong pursuit and the circumstances surrounding foster care can cause people to need to postpone college. Eligible students can sign themselves up at www.atthetable.org/for-students and do not need to be referred by a partner organization.
During FY23, At the Table served a total of 134 students ranging in age from 17 to 34, with an average age of 22. About 50% are currently in foster care and 50% are formerly in care at the time they start in the program. A small majority (57%) are already enrolled in college when they join At the Table, and most (60%) are attending two-year colleges, where a recent study from Chapin Hall estimated the degree completion rate for young people formerly in care at just 8%.
College Access Advisor and Emergency Fund
At the Table hired our first College Access Advisor in Spring 2023. While many college access professionals focus solely on getting students into college, this role was designed with a recognition that basic resources are also needed in order to access college education. At the Table’s College Access Advisor not only
Laura Simpson, College Access Advisor
Tutoring & Advising
supports students with developing college plans that work for them, but also collaborates with them to ensure that they are in the overall life situation needed to successfully pursue college by connecting them with benefits, housing, and other resources that if not present would otherwise hinder their educational progress. Since her hire, our brilliant college access advisor, Laura, has already assisted students with navigating medical challenges, resolving tuition balances, securing college readmission, and securing or reinstating housing vouchers, SNAP, public assistance, SSI, and so much more.
We also invested $20,000 in a pilot of an emergency fund that we made available to students throughout FY23. The fund repays tuition arrears, covers housing balances, and resolves other urgent expenses like food, wi-fi and cell phone bills. In FY23, we served 25 students with an average of $854.18 each. This is in addition to our already implemented student supplies fund which connects students with the necessary tools for coursework, including primarily, laptops and textbooks. In FY23, we served 20 students with textbooks with an average of $113.58 each and we served 13 students with laptops for an average of $346.41 each.
Success Stories
Rocketing from High School Diploma to Bachelor’s Degree
When JH was connected to us by our partner, City Living, in Fall 2020, he was enrolled in college, but his high school diploma was from an online program not recognized by NY state. As a result, he was unable to receive federal aid. Together with JH, we confirmed that he was eligible for a rarely-used New York diploma pathway that allowed him to receive a high school diploma as long as he had 24 college credits, which allowed him to extend the short-term funding he’d been relying on. We also connected him with a tutor, who he met with more than 30 times. In early 2021 we got an email from him with the subject line “I’m on the Dean’s List,” and shortly thereafter he applied for and received his NYS high school diploma. He continued earning credits at such a spectacular rate that, just two years later, at the end of the Fall 2022 semester, he received his Bachelor’s degree from Empire State University. He’s currently meeting with our College Access Advisor to develop his graduate school applications.
Cutting Red Tape for a Return to School
We learned about G from another At the Table student, who told us about a talented, determined friend of hers who had also been in foster care and had to leave school because she owed money to the college. We asked our student for G’s contact information and
Tutoring & Advising
learned that G had a tuition balance of over $5,000 at a CUNY four-year college despite being in good academic standing, due to a financial aid gap. CUNY’s FYCSI program, which offers extensive funding for students who were in foster care as adolescents, would have covered her balance, but she didn’t know about the program, and then when she tried to verify her foster care status, the NYC and NY state foster care systems said they had no record of her. Through discussions with G and research, we figured out that G was actually in a form of federal (not state or city) foster care, and tracked down her NYC-based foster care provider for a letter that proved her status, which was accepted. G, working closely with her tutor, was able to return to school for the Fall 2023 semester, and the FYCSI has committed to covering her full balance.
The At the Table team playing Codenames Pictures together, a staff favorite board game.
Our Results
We owe it to our students to carefully evaluate our programming - not only the results and outcomes, but students’ experiences with us and our effectiveness in engaging with them around their goals and concerns. At the Table gathers information through annual student surveys, session feedback from tutors, our student sign-up form, and grades data. In this section, we will review our results and share what we have learned from them.
Intake and Sessions Held
“[My tutor] Heather was on top of everything and was always organized! She also contributed to my academic success! She’s great!”
- At the Table student
In FY23, we held 1,987 tutoring sessions and 875 content/advising contacts1 with 134 students. Students stayed very connected with their tutors; those who were in the program for both semesters had about 33 total sessions and contacts on average over the course of the year. These numbers varied widely based on students’ needs, preferences, and availability; the interquartile range of sessions + contacts was 16 to 56.
We continued to successfully engage a strong majority of students who expressed interest in receiving services from At the Table. 49/67 (73%) of eligible students who filled out our interest form in FY23 ended up having at least 2 tutoring sessions by October 1st 2023, with a median time to first session of 20 days after the student filled out the interest form.
1 Content/advising contacts are briefer meetings or asynchronous advisement given by a tutor to a student: for instance, detailed support with an admissions process over text message, or essay help. We used to refer to these as “advising sessions”.
Our Results
Retention
Retention measures the percentage of enrolled college students served by At the Table in Fall 2022 who were registered for classes as of the start of the Fall 2023 semester.
Overall, about 78% (51/65) of At the Table students either continued in college or graduated from Fall ‘22 to Fall ‘23. This number was about the same as in FY22, when 76% of students were retained or graduated.
Retention
Fall 2023 cohort (N=65)
In FY23, 4 students left college via graduation. They graduated from City College, City Tech, Empire State University, and Bronx Community College. Students who earned an associate degree and continued on, or who started with At the Table in Spring ‘23, are not counted.
Grades and Credit Attainment
From a GPA standpoint, At the Table’s students posted their best year ever, earning GPAs in the B-/B range on average, well above the 2.0 required to maintain good academic standing and the 2.5 needed to transfer to most public four-year colleges in New York.
Students passed about 65% of their classes, failed 7%, received incompletes2 in 2%, and
2 Incomplete grades are assigned to students when due to illness or emergency they are unable to complete the course. They are then given additional time, often until the end of the next semester, to make up any missing coursework and earn a grade.
Our Results
withdrew from the remaining 26%.
A’s and B’s accounted for about 50% of student grades, and students recorded four times as many A’s as F’s. In FY24, we hope to increase the rate at which students pass classes and earn credits, and we are also tweaking our grades data collection policies to better track progress toward graduation and account for summer and winter classes.
Fall 2020 Cohort Graduation
For the first time, we were able to look back at the results from our very first cohort of At the Table students and draw some conclusions about graduation rates. Here is graduation data for all 28 students who participated in At the Table in Fall 2020, as of the end of the Spring 2023 semester, after three full academic years.
Our Results
Overall, 12/28 (43%) of these students have already earned degrees. 5/28 (18%) hold 2-year degrees, and of these, 4 have transferred to 4-year colleges to continue their education.
When the continuing students who have yet to earn a degree are accounted for, we are projecting a 50-55% college degree completion rate for this cohort, which is a vast improvement over the typical college outcomes for the students we serve. Our best available baseline is a Chapin Hall study that found that people with foster care experience who enrolled in college had a six-year degree completion rate of 12%. There is much research still to be done, but we are excited by these early results.
Student Survey Results
“My first semester at John Jay was easy. Even though [I] had problems with cognitive psychology, Jaclyn still made sure all my essays were done correctly. and showed me better studying techniques.”
- At the Table student
Each year, At the Table emails a confidential survey to every student who received at least 2 tutoring sessions in the prior academic year. In FY23, 116 students received the survey and 35 students responded.
Of 35 respondents, 33 said they were “extremely satisfied” and 2 said they were “somewhat satisfied” with the program. 100% (35/35) said they would recommend At the Table to other students.
Students also had useful feedback on program areas for growth. Individual students requested:
• In-person tutoring
• Grad school tutoring
• More meetings per week,
• Additional emergency funds
• “Nothing, you guys are amazing!”
Our Consulting Work
At the Table is first and foremost an organization that directly supports college students with lived experience of foster care, but this is not the full extent of what we do.
Our consulting work, which draws on our team’s deep knowledge of education and social service policy and practice, allows us to help improve systems and outcomes for hundreds of students who we may never get to meet.
This year, we continued to provide fee-for-service consultation for the Fair Futures Initiative, Children’s Aid, Children’s Village, and Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York. A $50,000 grant from the Fund for the City of New York / Center for Fair Futures gave us an opportunity to deepen our technical assistance work for Fair Futures, including through the development of a High School Scorecard Tool.
The High School Scorecard Tool uses open-source data to help foster care middle school specialists and families of students in foster care navigate New York City’s complex school choice process to find the high-performing high schools they deserve. It allows for comparative ranking of all the schools in a borough with commute times, filtered by admissions method. It draws on high school graduation rate and school survey info published by NYC DOE and calculates travel time on public transit from a student’s home to their school of choice. This is the kind of in-depth research and information that parents of privileged students pay educational consultants thousands of dollars for; we’re putting it in the hands of everyone who works with middle schoolers in foster care.
Our Consulting Work
Our partners on the Fair Futures team have called it an “awesome,” and “amazing,” resource, and since its roll-out in late 2022, we’ve already seen evidence that this tool, along with the high school advising process At the Table co-developed with Advocates for Children, is helping to level the playing field for students in foster care. Preliminary results from the December 2022 high school application process suggest that, for the first time ever, Fair Futures students got into schools that were slightly better on average than their peers who were not in foster care.
The High School Scorecard is just one way that At the Table helps improve the knowledge and tools available to young people in foster care and the staff who support their longterm aspirations. As we continue to grow our operational capacity, we hope to expand our consultation work in turn.
Our High School Scorecard Tool
In FY 2023, At the Table spent $671,000 and took in $880,000 for a net operating revenue of $209,000. For the first time, we contracted directly with foster care agencies to provide tutoring services, and this accounted for approximately 15% of our revenue. We also received substantial new grants from the Tiger Foundation, Arbor Rising, the Ira DeCamp foundation, the Center for Fair Futures, and the Solon Summerfield Foundation.
Our annual budget doubled from FY22 to FY23 as we added new staff, and our projected budget for FY24 topped $1M for the first time as we plan to add an additional tutor and have onboarded two new operations staff. Our hope is that our additional operations capacity, while adding to our bottom line expense, will greatly increase our capacity to build new partnerships and fundraise for At the Table. + $80,742.16 in contributions + $681,670.46 in private grants + $218,000.00 in fee-for-service - $607,172.92 in personnel - $33,400.56 in administrative costs - $30,572.55 in a student emergency fund, school supplies, and staff trainings a surplus that will allow us to sustain our work in future years to come...
2023, we raIsed
2023, we Invested
2023, we realIzed + $980,412.62 Total revenue - $671,146.03 Total expenses = $309,266.59 Net income
Fiscal Year 2023 Statement of Activity
July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023
Giving Thanks
“At the Table helped me graduate from college [City College of New York] this year! Thank you again.”
- Cordale M.
When we started At the Table in Fall 2020, at the height of a global pandemic, we scarcely could have believed that three years later, we would be a thriving team capable of serving over 120 students while also advocating for and informing systems changes that have had a positive impact on young people throughout New York City.
Our work of the last three years has reinforced our deep belief in the value of having a community of support, and we would like to thank some members of ours:
• At the Table’s board of directors, for your encouragement, good counsel, careful stewardship, and the innumerable concrete ways in which you make our work better.
• Our students, for trusting us and bringing us into your educational and life journeys. It’s an immense honor to get to work with each of you!
• Our staff, who, with skill, patience, and care, bring our shared values into practice.
• City Living NYC, which has connected so many of our students with housing, and to their Executive Director, Liz Northcutt, who has been a fountain of valuable advice.
• Pinnacle Prep, who graciously provided high-quality direct test prep support to At the Table’s students, free of charge.
• Katie Napolitano for your tireless support of and advocacy for At the Table, and to the Fair Futures team for being such crucial partners in everything we do.
• Shirley de Peña, who does a monumental and often-thankless job overseeing CUNY’s FYCSI funding for students who have experienced foster care, and to the college
Giving Thanks
administrators and professors at CUNY, SUNY, and beyond, who listen to and care about our students.
• The education teams at JCCA, Children’s Aid, Children’s Village, and the SLAM team at Graham Windham, for directly contracting with us to serve your students.
• The organizations and individuals that offered direct financial support to At the Table. Nothing we do would be possible without the resources you’ve invested in us.
We recognize below the individuals and organizations that contributed or raised more than $1,000 for At the Table during Fiscal Year 2023
K Anderson Anonymous (1)
Arbor Rising Arctos Foundation
Lily Auchincloss Foundation
Janel Anderberg Callon Center for Fair Futures
Joe Charlet
Ira W. De Camp Foundation
Paulette and Stephan de la Veaux
Kate Fussell
Jen Keiser Gordon + David Gordon
Brad Hargreaves + Amanda Moskowitz
Harman Family Foundation
Conrad N. Hilton Foundation
Mary J. Hutchins Foundation
M + D Kent
Pinkerton Foundation
Peter Robbins + Page Sargisson
Rose Schapiro
SJ Stamm
Solon Summerfield Foundation
Tiger Foundation
Warner Fund
WEGCF of Minneapolis Foundation
Robert + Robin Zink
Jeffrey Zink
What's Next
In last year’s report, we laid out a series of ambitious goals for broadening and deepening At the Table’s programming, including doubling the size of our tutoring team and increasing our support for students facing out-of-college challenges through staffing and emergency funding. We are proud to have achieved those goals in FY23, and we hope to build on those successes in the year to come.
In FY24, we have added one additional tutor to increase our capacity to 140 students, but our primary focus is on creating durable partnerships, infrastructure, and practices that will help us sustain and grow At the Table for years to come. This work is already underway.
As of this writing, At the Table has hired our first two operations staff: a Community Development Coordinator focusing on development, partnerships and program support and an Operations and Analytics Coordinator focusing on back-end processes, finance, design, and data.
Chelsea Wang, Operations and Analytics Coordinator
Juan Santiago, Community Development Coordinator
What's Next
This new operations team will allow us to:
• Keep our community informed about our progress, and plan and hold events for students and supporters alike
• Build partnerships and coalitions to secure needed resources for our students and advocate for systems change
• Improve our data collection efforts and build automations that will improve student experiences with At the Table and beyond
• Manualize our policies and practices, allowing us to function more effectively as an organization and avoid information loss as we grow
With these new capabilities, we expect to be well-positioned to pursue further growth within New York City in FY25. We are beginning to evaluate our opportunities to expand, whether through agency contracting, public funding, or by growing our own base of supporters. We also know that we have a commitment to every At the Table student, current and future, to make sure that expansion and scale never dilute the quality of our program or erode our values.
We are so glad to have the chance to be part of this unique community of staff and students as it grows from a small program to a thriving nonprofit, and we are excited to continue to share our journey with you.
Dear Najee,
At our first tutoring session in 2020, you logged on to our Zoom meeting from a hospital room. I was pretty surprised since you hadn’t given me any indication that anything was wrong, so I asked if you wanted to reschedule and said it wouldn’t be a problem for us to find a better time. But in your relaxed and mildmannered way, you said “you’re good” and told the doctors you were going to do a tutoring session and would need about an hour to yourself.
At that time, I didn’t know your medical history or the extent of your health challenges. I didn’t know how many doctors you had seen, how much stress you’d experienced, what kinds of medications you were on or how they affected you. And honestly, I never really did. I never knew someone who was limited by a medical diagnosis.
I knew someone who was kind. Someone who always greeted me enthusiastically and genuinely asked how I was doing at the beginning of our sessions. You would ask about my daughter (I have another one now by the way!) and wish me a happy holiday, no matter what it was, Christmas or Labor Day.
I knew someone with a spirit of gratitude. Last Thanksgiving, you texted me, “Today I am thankful for you Ashia. I started with just you as a tutor, now you [spread] your love around and got me [tutors for] my other classes for me just to graduate this year. Appreciate that ” Najee, I want you to know that when I matched you with another tutor, I felt like I was doing them a favor by giving them a chance to meet you. Jaclyn, Ethel, and I were all delighted to work with you. In fact, Jaclyn and I would fight over who would do a session with you!
I knew someone who loved to laugh. I still think of you any time I see a video clip of Family Matters or hear a reference to Steve Urkel. The way you laughed when you told me about some of your favorite episodes makes me chuckle even now.
I knew someone who was ambitious. One of your last texts to me was “I just want my five points lol” after you’d gotten a 95 on an assignment. This was around the same time you’d earned an A+ in your Environmental Health class! You were always willing to do whatever it took to earn the best grade you could. Early morning tutoring sessions, late night sessions, weekend sessions, multiple-times-a-day sessions! Your drive to accomplish your goal of graduating college was unwavering.
In the months since your passing, I’ve met and had several conversations with your Nana. She is wonderful! Getting to spend time with her has shown me how you got to be such a ray of light, and I was honored to attend your Bronx Community College graduation ceremony at her invitation.
Congratulations again on your college graduation, Najee.
