Daily Lumina News 071521

Student parents, often sidelined as a niche population with the attention and investment to match, sit at the frayed seams of the many big challenges philanthropy aims to address—economic mobility, educational equity, and racial justice, write Generation Hope's Nicole Lynn Lewis and Vinice Davis of Imaginable Futures in this op-ed.
Racial equity in the United States will remain elusive if we can’t figure out how to help these students. As we rebuild from the pandemic, we have an opportunity to redesign our higher education system and put their needs front and center.

A confluence of events in 2020—George Floyd's killing by police and the protests that followed, the presidential election, the disparities in COVID infection and death rates across different communities, and the California wildfires—compelled Leszek Gawareckito to take stock of what he could do to help students better understand these realities.
Gawarecki, head of the mathematics department at Kettering University, came up with an idea: create a new course on math for social justice to broaden STEM students' horizons.

When Felesia Stukes joined the faculty at Johnson C. Smith University in 2017, she was the first Black computer science faculty member in the institution's 150-year history. Today, she is working hard to lay a foundation for her students to become future colleagues.
As STEM educators try to get more students from traditionally underrepresented populations to pursue STEM fields, they are emphasizing innovative approaches that explore intersections with the arts, humanities, business, and sports. Many are also leveraging science and STEM to address issues and inequities in their own communities.

Through no fault of their own, millennials have become the generation playing financial catch-up. They started their careers around the time of the Great Recession and struggled to rebound—and then the pandemic came.
Their story is one of perseverance and, for many, of progress against these head winds. But the setbacks exaggerated trends already underway in the rest of the American workforce: A widening of the already-yawning gap between the haves and have-nots played out along gender, educational, and racial and ethnic lines.