Ayanna Adams, '14
When Ayanna Adams, ’14, was a freshman, she knew wanted to volunteer. Since she had just graduated from high school, Adams thought that the best place to begin would be helping high school students with their questions about college.
“So you want to go to college?” Adams asked the group. “What do you want to know?”
The answer was not what she had expected.
“It was a culture shock,” she says. “These kids didn’t know what a major was. They didn't know what a minor was. They didn’t know what the SATs were. When I was in high school, nobody sat down and explained the SATs to me because everybody just knew. My mom had been talking to me about college for as long as I can remember.
“This got me thinking. These students are juniors in high school — where does this disconnect begin?”
Adams, an accounting major with a finance concentration, started volunteering with the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement program Pathways to a College Experience (PACE) her first year. PACE addresses college-access issues by working with Richmond city high school students through the college-preparation process. The program focuses on three phases: readiness, access, and transition. Adams works in the college-access sector, explaining financial aid, majors and minors, and other aspects of applying to college to students at John Marshall High School.
“You want to make it personal but you also don't want to intimidate the students,” she says. “You try to create a mentor-mentee relationship so that they come to you directly if they want to ask anything.”
When Adams saw the progress she made with the students at John Marshall, she joined two other volunteer programs—Girl Talk and Youth Life. Both are part of Build It, a civic-engagement program that develops long-term partnerships with public schools and nonprofit organizations to address a variety of issues in Northside Richmond.
In Girl Talk, Adams mentors a small group of girls at Henderson Middle School. The discussion-based group is geared toward the development of confidence and self-esteem.
“We talk about issues that they really don’t discuss in school, whether it is their relationship with their parents or teachers or boys or other girls,” she says. “We also talk about their pressure points — what makes you tick? How do you try to control that anger?
“A lot of them look up to us. One of the girls wrote in her journal that we were like her moms that went to college.”
Youth Life, on the other hand, is a different experience. In this after-school program, Adams is paired with only one student, who she has worked with for two years.
“Sometimes she struggles but I know what her weaknesses are and that’s the great thing about Youth Life,” she says. “You can stick with your student and you know what she needs help with.”
Adams continued her pursuit of education advocacy through an internship at Higher Achievement, a rigorous after-school program for middle school students. She works with the director of donor relations as a development intern, encouraging people to donate to the organization and helping with data entry.
“One of our big programs every year is a one-hour ask event where we ask big business people, big influences in the community, anyone who can make a nice donation, for money,” Adams says. “You basically showcase Higher Achievement in an hour.”
The internship was a look at how Adams could combine her interest in education with her preparation to be a CPA. Adams says that while people usually picture accountants sitting in an office, crunching numbers all day, in reality that is not always the case.
“There are so many different ways — consulting, taxes,” she says. “But my passion, what I want to do, is to be the CFO of an education-based nonprofit organization. Having accounting knowledge will be beneficial since a lot of those organizations do not have that business background.”
Photo: Ayanna Adams, left, with Youth Life student LenNexus Prescod