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This article by Mark Newman originally appeared on MLB News.
NEW YORK — This was already an especially big year for the Jackie Robinson family, with next month’s 70th anniversary of the breaking of baseball’s color barrier, the dramatic unveiling of No. 42’s statue on April 15 at Dodger Stadium, and the 95th birthday of Jackie’s wife, Rachel, in July.
It just got a lot bigger. The Jackie Robinson Museum has just been cleared for takeoff.
At Monday night’s annual awards dinner, where Hall of Fame-bound baseball writer Claire Smith and Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky were each honored with the ROBIE Award, Jackie Robinson Foundation CEO Della Britton Baeza announced that JRF has received a sudden $6.5 million gift over three years that puts it over the fundraising hump in allowing construction to begin soon.
Strada Education Network, formerly USA Funds, announced the grant to the Jackie Robinson Foundation to support its mission of education and leadership development. The grant is the largest single donation to JRF since its founding by Rachel Robinson in 1973, the year after the death of her husband. The grant funds 30 JRF Scholars, allows the Foundation to launch a large expansion of its celebrated college success program, and caps off the fundraising goal that allows for the construction of the museum.
“The Jackie Robinson Museum is important because it’s my mom’s last big thing that she wanted to achieve, and we feel like we’re going to be ready to start building relatively soon,” said Sharon Robinson, Jackie’s daughter and MLB’s educational programming consultant and author. “We’ve been planning this for many years, these things take a long time, and we still have a lot more fundraising to continue to do. But it will sort of give us another branch to the Foundation, and a way to reach the young people and engage them in conversation about life and social change and ongoing issues that we are all having to deal with.”
William Hansen, president and CEO of Strada Education Network, said the museum will be a “center for advancing the social justice issues, including the achievement gap in higher education that Jackie and Rachel Robinson so courageously addressed.”
The museum, which will be located at 75 Varick Street near the Holland Tunnel entrance in Manhattan, will chronicle the legend’s storied athletic career and his defining, long-lasting impact across society through state-of-the-art exhibits, precious artifacts, film and other media. It will serve as an activity-oriented venue, a destination for innovative educational programming and a place for vibrant dialogue on critical social issues. Construction is expected to begin this spring, and further details will be coming soon.
In 2016, Major League Baseball donated $1 million toward the museum’s fundraising goal. A portion of Strada’s donation also goes to that same effort, putting it at $22 million of the overall $42 million needed to complete the museum by 2019, which will be the 100th anniversary year of Robinson’s birth.
Smith will be honored at the Baseball Hall of Fame this summer as the first woman to receive the Baseball Writers’ Association of America’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award. A pioneer within the baseball community for 35 years, Smith was the first female to cover a Major League beat full time and the second national baseball columnist in the country. In her career, she has written for multiple newspapers, including The Hartford Courant, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times. She is now a coordinating news editor with ESPN.
“The ROBIE Award, I can’t even call it a dream come true because that would be understating what this means to me,” Smith said. “I have loved the idea of Rachel and Jackie Robinson since I was in elementary school. I saw ‘The Jackie Robinson Story’ when I was in third grade at St. James Elementary School in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, and I fell in love with the idea of what Rachel and Jackie did for America, and did for baseball. I became an entrenched baseball fan at that point. My mom and dad were baseball fans, my mom was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, so I was already loving the Dodgers, but that sealed the deal.”
Smith, who was honored in January at the annual New York Baseball Writers Dinner, has been an influential voice among African-American writers and editors throughout her career. She is a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and winner of three New York Times Publishers Awards.
“To come along at this point in my career, the 70th anniversary of Jackie Robinson, to have so many wonderful things happen at the start of 2017, I know this isn’t the culmination yet, I know that Cooperstown is coming, but to receive a phone call saying that the Jackie Robinson Foundation, that Rachel and Sharon and Len Coleman want to honor me, it made me cry,” Smith said. “It still makes me cry. Rachel and Jackie Robinson are my heroes, and I love them. I love what they did for America, and I love what they did in prompting me to follow their story, to follow the story of America and baseball’s intertwined history with this country, and I am forever grateful. I will cherish this for the rest of my life.”
Sharon Robinson said of Smith: “We are very proud of Claire and proud she is going to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. It is a special evening for us. She’s a woman and she’s a pioneer in baseball and baseball journalism, so to be able to honor her and have my mom here is really great.”
Gorsky is chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson. A longtime advocate of diversity and inclusion, Gorsky has been named one of the “100 Most Inspiring Leaders” by Pharma Voice. He is executive sponsor of two Johnson & Johnson employee resource groups, the Women’s Leadership Initiative and the Veteran’s Leadership Council. The former Army veteran is on many boards, including the Congressional Medal of Honor board.
“To think that I’m actually able to be up here this evening with the Jackie Robinson award and to see those iconic people — at a time when I believe words like ‘iconic’ and ‘famous’ and ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ are so overused — to see them truly as they were intended, in something like the Jackie Robinson Foundation, I couldn’t be more thankful,” Gorsky said.
Mark Newman is enterprise editor of MLB.com and a baseball writer since 1990. Read and join other baseball fans on his MLB.com community blog.
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The letter was delivered in response to the department’s request for information regarding the disclosure of confidential wage records under the department’s regulations governing the confidentiality and disclosure of state unemployment compensation data. Strada also included specific recommendations for regulatory amendments.
Report indicates both success and need for improvement in meeting students’ varied goals
A new and improved Free Application for Federal Student Aid expected late this year should provide opportunities for more students and their families to access money to pay for college. Yet the transition to this new form presents unprecedented challenges for those who work to help students complete it.
According to new Strada Education Foundation research, community college attendees who complete an associate degree or successfully transfer to a four-year institution value their education at rates comparable to or higher than recent bachelor’s degree completers. However, researchers found first-generation students rated the value of their community college education about 20 percentage points lower than those who are not first-generation students.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley, president and CEO of College Futures Foundation and former chancellor of the California Community Colleges, will join a Strada Education Foundation webinar Sept. 7, when he and other panelists will explore Strada’s latest report, “The Value of Community Colleges: Recent Students' Motivations and Outcomes,” which captures several factors that motivated recent alumni to enroll in community college.
Major changes in the form, combined with an expected delay in its release, are combining to intensify the work of spreading the word about the updated FAFSA.
This article by Madeline St. Amour originally appeared in Inside Higher Ed.
Virginia’s largest community college and a prominent public research university have co-partnered with an educational management and student support service provider to improve academic outcomes for transfer students.
Edtech integration can cause headaches if technology solutions aren't "getting along"--but a new free tool could help alleviate that pain
New building will house over 500 employees
DXtera Institute, a nonprofit consortium of higher ed institutions, ed tech companies and other postsecondary education professionals, has released a free Next Generation Integration Scorecard (NGIS) aimed at improving technology integration in higher education.
Massachusetts will be the recipient of financial and technical help to build “data-driven approaches” to linking residents to jobs in growing industries, thanks to a partnership between the National Governors Association and the Strada Education Network.
This article by Carol D’Amico originally appeared on RealClear Education.
This article by Jeffrey J. Selingo originally appeared on the Washington Post.
The letter alerting Cal State Northridge students that they were being put on academic probation was pretty blunt and scary: shape up or risk getting kicked out.
Michigan State University has long worked with and competed against other colleges and universities in the United States.
One of the students leaving today on “Roadtrip Indiana” says she expects an “awakening” of what Indiana is about. Purdue University senior Shannon Newerth is joining two other Indiana students on a two-week RV trip throughout the state to take part in career exploration and work-based learning opportunities. The trip, organized in part by the Indiana Commission for Higher Education and several private partners, will be the subject of an upcoming public television documentary.
As a lifelong baseball fan, former high school baseball player, and coach for 20 years, I have always been struck by how deeply intertwined baseball and learning really are. An education advocate for most of my career, I have seen firsthand how a passion for sports can shift mindsets and create sustainable pathways to college, meaningful careers, and inspired lives.
More than half of adults in the U.S. would change at least one aspect of their higher education experience, according to a new survey from Gallup and the Strada Education Network. Common regrets were choice of institution and major or field of study. Comparatively, relatively few regretted their degree type.
A majority of Americans who attended college say they received a quality education. But half would change at least one of these three decisions if they could do it all over again: the type of degree they pursued or their choice of major or institution.
CLEVELAND, Ohio – Half of college graduates regret their choice of school or major, according to a national survey.
Approximately half of all U.S. adults who pursued or completed a postsecondary degree would change at least one aspect of their education experience if they could do it all over again, including their major or field of study, the institution they attended, or the type of degree they obtained.
Regrets, I’ve had a few…and so have most Americans — at least when it comes to decisions they’ve made regarding their education. A new Gallup poll out today finds that 51 percent of Americans would change at least one of their education decisions if they had to do it all over again. Thirty-six percent said they’d choose a different major, 28 percent would attend a different school and 12 percent would pursue a different type of degree, according to the poll.
On May 2, the Senate Career and Technical Education Caucus in conjunction with the Alliance for Excellent Education hosted “College and Career Pathways: Stories of Innovation.” The Alliance is a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization focusing on high school redesign for underrepresented students. The briefing revolved around “highlighting innovative approaches across the country to college and career pathways that have led to positive outcomes for traditionally underserved students.”
Data analytics has proven to be a powerful tool in a number of industries, and in higher ed, it has significant potential to help institutions streamline operations and improve experiences for students. But in using that data, colleges and universities must also be careful to also consider the underlying causes behind some of those numbers.
This is important news for admissions officers, who may feel that low-income students pose more of a risk at a four-year college or university. These students are just as capable of thriving as those from more affluent households, but institutions and policymakers must also consider that they may need more resources.
In a Monday morning session at the ASU+GSV Summit in Salt Lake City, a panel of thought leaders discussed how to expand access and success, particularly among low-income, first-generation and underrepresented student populations.
INDIANAPOLIS — Higher Education Commissioner Teresa Lubbers recently announced a new initiative, “Roadtrip Indiana,” that aims to help Hoosier students make more informed decisions about their futures through intentional career exploration and direct engagement with employers across the state.