-: So my name is Dr. Craig Smith.
I'm the Director of Student Retention and Success
at Montgomery County Community College.
I'm also the CEO and Founder of Fostering Success:
Boys to Men, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization
that targets work with at-risk males
that are in and out of foster care.
At MontCo, I pretty much lead college-wide,
and we have three different campuses:
Blue Bell, Pottstown, and The Culinary Arts,
which is not too far from Blue Bell.
But I lead all the college-wide retention initiatives.
So we're currently in week four of five weeks' worth
of welcome events and activities.
My focus, my team pretty much oversees and leads all
of the student-retention initiatives as they relate
to those things, those potential barriers
that are nonacademic.
So, food insecurity, housing insecurity,
mental health challenges, any of those particular issues
pretty much fall in my lap; and we curtail them.
While at Fostering Success,
we have six different pillar programs;
the primary one that really got a lot of recognition
from this very heavy time-commitment
was our emerging leaders
of tomorrow rites of passage programs.
So it's a 12-week program
where we take the program physically
into facilities where young men have been assigned
a certain amount of time to stay there based off
of some bad choices that they made early on.
So that three-day-a-week, couple-hour-a-day program,
Saturdays, 12-weeks, so the time-commitment
is pretty heavy there.
But then on the flip side,
we offer weekly Dine and Dialogues.
So we're attempting to change the narrative
around black and brown boys in the city of Philadelphia.
So that's a three, four-hour conversation over a meal.
The last one that we ran was Depression, a Silent Killer
in the Community and Is Cannabis the Answer?
So we held a dialogue around depression and its impact
in the black community as well as the issue with cannabis,
and how some people look at it as the medicinal side
of it is possibly a solvent to some
of these issues and challenges.