UPDATED: April 6, 2021 at 10:00 a.m.

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Zainab Kumandan saw her friend start the nonprofit organization You Can Too at Columbia University and knew that she needed to bring it to Syracuse.

With the help of her friend and fellow Syracuse University junior Khloe Green, the two worked with the national You Can Too executives to form a branch of the organization on campus at the start of the fall 2020 semester. Kumandan is now president of the Syracuse branch and Green is the vice president.

“We worked together as a team to get everything started before the fall semester so we could have the program running at the start of the year,” Green said.

The program pairs Black, Brown and Latinx students in middle and high school with SU students who have similar backgrounds to offer them educational help through tutoring resources, resume reviews and creating a LinkedIn profile. The organization currently has five mentors and also discusses issues of racial and social injustice.

After one of the five undergraduate students is paired with a mentee, they meet six times a semester. The meetings would normally be done in person, meaning that a SU student would see their mentee at a local Syracuse middle school or high school, but to follow COVID-19 safety precautions, the sessions have only been held over Zoom.

Each two-hour session between the mentee and mentor is split up in three parts. The first 45 minutes are devoted to academic topics such as tutoring and resume building. The second 45 minutes are spent on a theme assigned by the national You Can Too executive board — previous themes include mass incarceration and affirmative action — and are based on the age of the mentee. For the last 15 minutes of the session, all the mentors and mentees come together for a discussion on that week’s theme led by the executive board.

“It’s kind of cool because it’s a community of people from so many different walks of life, and we try to facilitate the conversation to give everyone a place to say something and be heard,” Kumandan said.

For both Kumandan and Green, You Can Too is really important to them, as they wish they had mentors of color during their high school experiences that they could look up to. They want to provide these students with the resources that they need to succeed and connect them with mentors who look like them and can relate to them.

SU junior Mena Sawyer believes You Can Too is a program that is about closing the education gap for students of color and providing them the resources to achieve their goals. Emily Steinberger | Photo Editor

For SU junior Mena Sawyer, who is the director of outreach for You Can Too Syracuse, the program is really about closing the education gap for students of color and giving them the resources to reach the goals that they are trying to achieve.

“I really like being able to connect with my mentee throughout the year and having the chance to give her the advice that I never received as a high school student,” Sawyer said.

Sawyer runs the program’s Instagram account which offers resources for Black, Brown and Latinx students to learn about the program and learn how to get involved. Recruitment to become a mentor during the fall 2021 semester will be announced through social media and on the national website.

“You Can Too is probably the best thing I’ve done in college,” Kumandan said. “It might be a small community but it has such a big impact on these kids.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this post incorrectly stated that Zainab Kumandan and Khloe Green are seniors. Kumandan and Green are juniors. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Published on April 5, 2021 at 10:06 pm