KA‘I Kūlana (postsecondary) Program (est. 2015)

Our KA‘I Kūlana Program provides intensive counseling for each of our students in postsecondary education as well as full tuition gap scholarships to pay for school-related expenses. While our KAʻI Program began with the goal of getting our students through high school graduation, this program was built in response to the need that low-income, first-generation college students have for a myriad of supports to and through postsecondary education. We have therefore developed our postsecondary program to be a highly-effective support program that assists our students with every step from the application process through completion of a two-year or four-year postsecondary degree.

The intensive support that we provide to and through postsecondary education includes assisting students with college applications and payments, helping each of our students to complete their FAFSA, mapping out their course registration each semester, connecting them to campus resources, helping them to resolve holds on their accounts, ensuring that financial aid is distributed, ensuring that their health requirements are met, checking each student account and paying bills on time, doing bimonthly individual check-ins with each student and conducting weekly grade checks to ensure students stay on track in their classes and any issues are addressed quickly.

This program has an 80 percent (61-of-76) college matriculation rate and eight students from our first three cohorts who entered the KAʻI Program as 6th graders have become the first college graduates of their families with many more KAʻI students following in their footsteps.