About GLOW
“GLOW helped me get to San Jose State. They helped me understand my tuition bill, find scholarships, and then awarded me the last $2,000 I need to enroll in a freshman year.”
Why College?
Listen to GLOW Scholars share what motivates them to go to college.
GLOW was founded in 2006 to address the financial barriers that highly motivated and capable, low-income students face in attending and graduating college.
Our MISSION is to empower under-resourced students and their families with critical financial literacy and planning skills needed to acquire funding to attend and graduate from college. GLOW delivers a low-cost, scalable, social enterprise that pools and links resources from the education field, businesses, public agencies and government to build the capacity of the college access and success field. By equipping students and their families with tangible financial skills like budgeting and debt management, GLOW’S goal is to break the cycle of poverty and build financially resilient communities.
OUR VISION is to enable ALL highly-motivated students from low income and under-resourced communities to overcome the challenges of financial literacy and funding, empowering them to graduate from college and reach their greatest potential.
OUR SOLUTION empowers students to proactively plan and seek their own funding to graduate from college. Leveraging the expertise and services of the college access and success field, GLOW is aligning efforts to integrate its financial education curriculum with school and nonprofit partners’ (affiliates) core-services, share best practices, and develop common metrics to enhance under-resourced student success rates. Also, GLOW aggregates and marshals in additional resources to its affiliate sites by engaging the business community to leverage their enthusiastic pool of employee volunteers to serve as mentors, monetary investments, networks and expertise to further enhance college readiness and success. (More about our Solutions)
Who we serve
GLOW partners and supports schools and nonprofits (affiliates) who target under-resourced students to access and succeed in college. These students demonstrate strong potential and are highly motivated with a demonstrated commitment to college education and qualities to be leaders in their communities.
- Over 85% of GLOW’S students are from low income families, qualifying for federally subsidized lunch program
- Over 80% of our students will be the first in their family to attend college.
- 66% Latino/a, 12% African American, 9% Asian, 2% Pacific Islander, 9% Mixed
(More about Our Students)
GLOW has been historically focused on the Bay Area but it is expanding its geographic focus statewide in California.
GLOW students from BUILD-Lionel Wilson and staff after the Budget Review Session