By M. Marlay
Campus News
On Thursday, April 3 at Chelsea Piers, the KAPLAN Education Foundation (KEF) celebrated the 19th anniversary of eliminating barriers and setting up community college students in the New York City area with the necessary resources to make it into and graduate from 4-year universities.
And their work seems to have gained an overwhelmingly positive response from people, with them having been able to collect over $50,000 in donations, just that night. At this celebration, they honored William Gould, Partner at Holland & Knight, and Elizabeth Burke, Chief Operating Officer at Global Action on Gun Violence as their KEF Champions as well as honored Daisy Auger-Domínguez, an award-winning global leader, speaker, and author who works to help strengthen workplaces, as the recipient of KEF’s Changemaker Award.
Auger-Domínguez started off her speech telling the audience why winning this award meant so much to her, stating, “It’s an honor to be here and to receive this beautiful award tonight. I receive this recognition with deep gratitude and even deeper admiration for who I believe are the true change-makers in this room, and that is the KEF Scholars. Like so many of you I know what it is like to navigate systems that were not designed with us in mind. To carry both ambition and doubt. But I also know what becomes possible when someone looks at you and says, ‘I see you, you belong.’ When I first arrived at Bucknell University I didn’t show up with full confidence. I actually showed up with a quiet sense of insecurity, and that was shaped from the moment I checked those boxes in my application. It was magnified as I walk into rooms where nobody looked like me or didn’t even know the little island I grew up on, and by the way that’s the Dominican Republic. And I carried with me not just that sense of finding a home, but also as you heard here before I carried the weight of my family’s dreams and hopes and hard work.”
She also recalled, “The moment someone truly saw me, and they said, ‘You belong here and we’re going to make sure you get there’… They made me feel like I belonged. They saw me, they challenged me, and they helped me see the change that I could make. So that others could be seen, could feel challenged, could also know that they have a place in the world where they could lead, where they could thrive, where they could grow. And that is what KEF does. We see it again and again… It helps scholars access opportunities and grow into the leaders that each and everyone of you are meant to be.”
KEF also took this time to award the Sean Hornstein Award. The Sean Horenstein Award is presented in honor of Hornstein who devoted his 25-year career to helping students from all backgrounds reach their educational and career goals. Each year one KEF Scholar is given this award, and this year the award was presented to Jose Gonzalez, a member of the 16th cohort.
Before Jane Rosenberg, the Executive Director and Board Member on the Scholar Selection Committee, presented the award to Gonzalez, recollected the moment in which she saw his application. Telling the audience even from the beginning that Gonzalez had big, multi-tiered plans for his future career, starting off with him opening his own law firm, getting involved in business, and ending with him becoming a teacher at a community college, where he started his path. And Gonzalez is truly on his path to accomplishing everything he has or will set his mind too.
Gonzalez at this time is a rising senior at Rice University, where he is earning his Bachelors degree in Finance and has interned for various businesses including: Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, which is a law form which has served International and national business organizations, Financial institutions, non-profit organizations, etc., and Jeffries, an American multinational independent investment bank and financial services company headquartered in New York City.
Finishing off his speech Gonzalez reminded everyone that, “Community colleges serve the same two years of education as other four year universities.”
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