Jasmine Haywood, Ph.D., is a strategy director for student success at Lumina Foundation, an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. In that role, she leads a portfolio of work that supports the creation of a system in which student success and credential attainment are scaled up significantly, particularly at four-year institutions.
Before joining Lumina, Haywood was a visiting faculty member in the Department of Educational Leadership at Indiana State University. Prior to joining ISU, she was the managing editor for the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, a research assistant at IUPUI’s Center for Urban and Multicultural Education, and an admissions counselor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Haywood has published peer-reviewed scholarship in the areas of Latino students in higher education, microaggressions, and faculty of color. She was named a 2016 Ebony Magazine Power 100 honoree and awarded the IU Neal-Marshall Alumni Club Standard Bearer Award. She holds master’s and doctoral degrees in higher education and student affairs from Indiana University.
North Carolina’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) built a distinguished history of serving adult learners with a clear, caring focus on students’ needs—and now they are leading the way for others to follow.
I wasn’t old enough to remember my mother carting me to campus at the University at Albany as an infant. When I asked her what it was like to be a young wife and mother in her senior year of college, she responded: “I never even told my professors that I had a baby.”
Seventeen months have passed since the murder of George Floyd moved millions of protesters into the streets to demand action, renewing the nation’s focus on race, equity, and systemic oppression. During this time, we have witnessed unprecedented commitments related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice from organizations spanning nearly every sector imaginable. In philanthropy, many foundations shifted their grantmaking strategies to center equity, while others launched new initiatives to change the paradigm of power within communities of color or other historically under-resourced groups.
Lumina Foundation is supporting new work at the intersection of higher education and racial equity by funding HBCUs to identify and eliminate some of the barriers blocking adult students from the education they need for long-term success.
When designed and implemented with equitable outcomes in mind, more engaged and active teaching and learning approaches—known as “high-impact practices” (HIPs) —can benefit college students across the board, especially students of color and adults, a Lumina-supported project shows.
San Quentin, one of the country’s most notorious prisons and the subject of movies, songs and TV shows, is fast becoming known for something else: rehabilitation.
