• Welcome
• How it Works
• Why it Works
• Colleges our Scholars Attend
• Meet our Kids

Scholars Program

Welcome

The One Voice Robert W. Sanderson Scholars Program begun in 1990 makes it possible for low income students to attend wonderful colleges on scholarships provided by the colleges themselves. 100% of One Voice Scholars gain admission to college and an impressive 95% graduate from college. This statistic stands in stark contrast to the national graduation rate of 40% among low income students. Over 30% of our students go on to graduate school where they earn higher degrees. One Voice alumni include physicians, attorneys, scientists, engineers, artists and educators.

How Our Program Works

Our Scholars Program prepares and places low income inner city Los Angeles high school students in colleges throughout the United States. Starting in the 11th grade, we work with teachers and counselors from a number of inner city high schools to select approximately 25 students who will become a part of our program each year. We work with these students over the next 5 years to help place them and then support them in their journey through college. Our program is the first of its kind to carefully monitor and follow students all the way through their undergraduate and graduate school careers.

Our scholars come from exceedingly impoverished backgrounds and live in neighborhoods ridden with gangs, drugs, violence and failure. They are often the first in their families to attend college and with our help, they see their dreams come true by attending the finest colleges in the nation. We provide one-on-one counseling services to each student to help them select and then apply to colleges best suited for them. Each of our students receives the following services on a personal basis without any cost to the student:

• Professional college advisement
• Personal counseling
• SAT preparation courses
• College essay instruction and tutoring
• Application and test fees
• Parent Counseling

As needed:

• Airfare and transportation
• Books, supplies and miscellaneous fees
• Clothing and personal items
• Health care and insurance
• Emergency expenses

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Why the program works

We believe our continual guidance and emotional support are the keys to our Scholars' outstanding success. We help students coming from South Central Los Angeles going to schools such as Brown, Yale and Amherst make all the necessary adjustments, from buying warm jackets to integrating into campus life.

With our help, our Scholars enroll and succeed in colleges they never would have known about or been able to attend. Because of our tremendous success rate, over 30 of the finest colleges come to our offices to recruit our students. The amount of scholarship money awarded from the colleges to our students now totals over $16,000,000. Every dollar contributed to the One Voice College Scholars Program yields over $5 in scholarship funds.

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Colleges our Scholars Attend

• Amherst
• Barnard
• Bates
• Bowdoin
• Brown
• Bucknell
• Carleton
• Colby
• Colorado College
• Connecticut
• Cornell
• Dartmouth
• Franklin & Marshall
• Hamilton
• Harvard
• Holy Cross
• Lewis & Clark
• Macalester
• Middlebury
• MIT
• Mount Holyoke
• Notre Dame
• Occidental
• Pomona
• Reed
• Smith
• Stanford
• Swarthmore
• Trinity
• Tufts
• All UCs
• University of Pennsylvania
• Wellesley
• Wesleyan
• Whitman
• Williams
• Yale

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Meet our Scholars

Edgar was born in El Salvador during the height of the civil war. When we first met Edgar as a student at Manual Arts High School, he spoke of how as a child he hid under parked cars when bullets were flying, and once watched a man he knew bleed to death. At that young age of 6, Edgar vowed he would make something of his life and dedicate it to helping people like his dying neighbor. Edgar graduated from Pomona College in 1998 and graduated from Stanford Medical School in 2004, and has just completed his residency in family medicine at White Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles. Talk about making dreams come true. After growing up so poor and struggling so hard, Edgar kept his vow and now saves lives. Edgar plans on opening a clinic in East Los Angeles to bring top-rate medical services to low income families.

Kinikia was raised by her grandmother who earned a meager living driving a bus. Her mother was a drug addict and her father was in jail serving a life sentence for murder. Kinikia dreamed of overcoming the circumstances stacked against her. So, she studied and worked hard, went to Kenyon College, where her first response was that it was so quiet because she didn't hear bullets whiz by or sirens screaming in the night. Kinikia graduated in 1997 and went on to receive a master's degree in Urban Planning from USC in 2002. She now works in Los Angeles as an urban planner and recently was able to purchase a little house of her own. Kinikia and her grandmother were overjoyed when they first walked into her new home. It was a fixer-upper; but of course Kinikia didn't care, because for her, it was another dream come true.

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