Craig is the Director of Student Retention and Success at Montgomery County Community College as well as the Founder of Fostering Success Boys to Men, LLC., a nonprofit working with at-risk males that are in and out of the foster care system. Whether on the school’s campus or out in the community with his nonprofit, Craig always has impact and growth on his mind; creating new ways to inspire and motivate students to achieve their own success.
Transcript
So my name is Dr. Craig Smith. I'm the Director of Student Retention and Success at Montgomery County Community College. I'm also the CEO and Founder of Fostering Success: Boys to Men, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that targets work with at-risk males that are in and out of foster care. At MontCo, I pretty much lead college-wide, and we have three different campuses: Blue Bell, Pottstown, and The Culinary Arts, which is not too far from Blue Bell. But I lead all the college-wide retention initiatives. So we're currently in week four of five weeks' worth of welcome events and activities. My focus, my team pretty much oversees and leads all of the student-retention initiatives as they relate to those things, those potential barriers that are nonacademic. So, food insecurity, housing insecurity, mental health challenges, any of those particular issues pretty much fall in my lap; and we curtail them. While at Fostering Success, we have six different pillar programs; the primary one that really got a lot of recognition from this very heavy time-commitment was our emerging leaders of tomorrow rites of passage programs. So it's a 12-week program where we take the program physically into facilities where young men have been assigned a certain amount of time to stay there based off of some bad choices that they made early on. So that three-day-a-week, couple-hour-a-day program, Saturdays, 12-weeks, so the time-commitment is pretty heavy there. But then on the flip side, we offer weekly Dine and Dialogues. So we're attempting to change the narrative around black and brown boys in the city of Philadelphia. So that's a three, four-hour conversation over a meal. The last one that we ran was Depression, a Silent Killer in the Community and Is Cannabis the Answer? So we held a dialogue around depression and its impact in the black community as well as the issue with cannabis, and how some people look at it as the medicinal side of it is possibly a solvent to some of these issues and challenges.
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