College Connections Hawaii's mission is to help every Hawaiian student gain access to college and achieve their highest potential. Mentoring, college advising, test preparation and tutoring services help all students find higher education opportunities right for them.
Our organization knows that the relationship between an adult and child, teacher and student, mentor and youth powerfully influences a young person’s life. So, our activities focus on higher education goals, but our mission is about something much bigger—giving our students belief in themselves, hope for their futures and pathways to successful livelihoods and community engagement.
As an educational nonprofit serving Hawaii for over 10 years, we have helped thousands of students in grades K-12 with college readiness and access. We do this by providing supplemental one-on-one after-school advising in schools where less than half of students are making it to college. We also offer SAT and COMPASS preparation classes at free and reduced prices and academic tutoring free of charge to low income students at qualified schools. Our family-oriented advising model is geared to needs of students from low income backgrounds or who are first in their families to attend college. In all program areas, College Connections serves more than 1,000 students from across the Hawaiian Islands each year.
Over the past year, College Connections Hawaii rebranded itself and revamped our website to reflect our educational mission. With the help from local marketing firm, Orange Roc, our site was completely overhauled from the overall design to its user-friendliness. A couple months ago, we took our rebranding project to new heights by becoming a Grassroots.org member, which allowed us to manage every aspect of our site website in-house. In that short span of time we have worked out any flaws on our site as well as improved our site’s functionality and responsiveness.
The Grassroots Toolbox allowed us to use TierraNet for our web hosting needs. Our website manager, Ben Trevino, has helped us throughout this transition and says, “The only tool I've used from Grassroots.org has been their hosting service. They provide a solid, industry standard PHP and MySQL environment that makes for very flexible web application development.”
Our new site has effectively allowed us to easily reach out to students, parents, and educators. Besides giving us the power to manage our own website, Grassroots.org and Grassroots Toolbox has saved us money!
-Asiana Ponciano
College Connections Hawaii
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