The nation’s first-ever historically Black community college (HBCC) conference is scheduled to take place Feb. 8-9 in Mobile, hosted by Alabama Possible, a Birmingham nonprofit that last year celebrated its 30th anniversary.

The EmpowerED Conference is drawing community college professionals, thought leaders, and students from HBCCs and predominately Black community colleges (PBCCs) from across the nation, according to the conference website, to “explore innovative strategies, best practices, and transformative ideas to advance educational excellence and equity within our institutions.”

Conference events include keynote addresses by Yolanda Watson, president of Complete College America, a national nonprofit working to increasing college completion rates and closing the performance gap among institutions of higher learning, and MC Brown, executive director of the Payne Center for Social Justice, which is focused on advancing racial and social equity through research that closely involves HBCUs. Conference participants will also attend a Mardi Gras parade and dinner at the Africatown Heritage House featuring a discussion with descendants of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to enter American waters.

Alabama Possible works to eradicate poverty but is also intentional about collaborations and has become “more focused about our advocacy efforts,” particularly for those whose voices have been ignored, said Chandra Scott, executive director since 2020.

Alabama has eight HBCCs – more than any other state. HBCCs are important, Scott said, because many students cannot attend traditional four-year colleges and “have been neglected and ignored. So, I have been calling that out at the national level and the local level.”

Removing barriers

Alabama Possible was founded in 1993 and “the mission is to remove barriers to prosperity. We do that through education, advocacy and collaboration,” Scott said. “The focus of our work is to get students and adult learners access to success through a post-secondary education pathway.”

Alabama Possible works to expand access to college, among other initiatives. (contributed)

One example she provides is her work concerning FAFSA or the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The annual application process opened Jan. 1.

Scott calls FAFSA the gateway to free aid such as scholarships, work study programs and Pell Grants and said she took on advocating for changes in the FAFSA policy in her first week at Alabama Possible in 2020. Those changes were approved the following year by the Alabama State Department of Education board.

“FAFSA is a very long, in-depth application to gathering student information, parent information, tax information and assets,” she said. And many potential applicants, according to Scott, are turned off from even applying because of the process.

Scott and her team at Alabama Possible, along with partners that included Gov. Kay Ivey, the Alabama Commission on Higher Education and the state education department, recognized that completion rates were low and that the applications were confusing to many.

Scott and her partners worked to decrease the number of questions on the application. And this year, many students and families will encounter a smaller, simpler version of that questionnaire.

“Instead of 100 questions, they will see only 50. That’s a huge barrier that’s been removed. Now it’s been simplified so students and families can take advantage of that,” Scott said.

Alabama Possible works to expand access to college, among other initiatives. (contributed)

Alabama is now 11th in the nation in terms of FAFSA completion rates and “that’s why we’re seeing nearly 60% of last year’s graduating seniors complete that FAFSA,” Scott said.

“That would not have happened before … we locked arms with other organizations around the country who were hearing the exact same thing we were hearing. And we took our voices to the federal level and shared our concerns about what we are hearing and so this is the first year that we’re seeing less questions.”

But even with successes, there are some hiccups.

“This year, the (FAFSA) application opened late. But I would always tell people, whenever there’s change, there’s always growing pains. And the good thing is this will benefit students, and we’re hoping more of them will complete this, so they won’t be turned off by the lengthy application,” said Scott.

A journey of faith

Scott, 48, is a Selma native. She has been married 19 years to husband Loren and has a daughter, 17-year-old Leah, and a 10-year-old son, Logan. She credits her faith with sustaining her on her professional and personal paths.

Her initial career of choice was to be a pharmacist while studying at Xavier University in New Orleans, but she eventually decided against it and developed a strong dislike for the coursework. She went on to complete undergraduate degrees in chemistry and biology.

“I took a path to understand what I was going to do, and I realized that I really enjoy the process of trying to determine the unknowns, because I’m a chemist at heart.”

Chandra Scott

That led to the nonprofit space with business startups, then morphed into a position at the Mobile Area Education Foundation as its strategic officer. She learned her niche was “how to see what no one sees and asking the questions that no one will ask.”

Scott enrolled at Michigan State University to get training with a certification in Nonprofit Leadership and Management “to understand the ins and outs” of strategic planning, she said. At Alabama Possible, she pulls on the experience of all her previous roles. And her work hasn’t gone unnoticed.

In 2021, she was appointed by Ivey to serve on the CTE Course of Study Committee, and then on the Alabama Post-secondary Mathematics Task Force in 2023.

She said sometimes, it seems she has been at Alabama Possible far longer than three years, because of what the organization has accomplished and how it has evolved during that time. The Alabama Power Foundation is among Alabama Possible’s supporters.

“It’s really been an amazing journey in these last three years to see how this organization has expanded its area of focus from being an organization that focuses on post-secondary access and collaboration to now strengthening our advocacy subsets – because it’s not just enough to get students in the door,” she said.

To learn more about the upcoming EmpowerED Conference in Mobile, click here. To learn more about Alabama Possible, click here.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Birmingham Times.