The kick-off of the Knight-funded Mobilize.org summit series, where young leaders get together to address pressing issues, was a rousing success.  The summit brought together more than 100 students from the San Jose area to sharpen their skills in becoming more active and engaged citizens. The topic, increasing college graduation rates, was selected by the students.

The students came to the summit with ideas that would increase graduation rates.  As they worked together from across several community colleges, it was exciting to see the students recognize the importance of creating a network of like-minded students to increase their impact.

Lisa M. Krieger, of the San Jose Mercury News wrote,

“The atmosphere felt electric at the conference, held at downtown San Jose’s Hilton Hotel, attended by 100 students — hand-picked by organizers — from Northern California community colleges.”  She continued, saying, “At an elegant Saturday night dinner, they listened attentively to a dinner speech by California Community Colleges Chancellor Jack Scott, and exchanged names, email addresses and phone numbers on business cards made for the event.”

On Sunday, five teams were presented with a Democracy 2.0 Award and will receive up to $7,500 to help establish original projects to address the challenges California students face in graduating from college.

One such projects is the Educators for Fair Consideration (E4FC) Student Outreach Team, which will train a network of undocumented students to reach out to each other, local schools, organizations, parents, faculty and staff to overcome the adversities keeping these youths from successfully pursuing a higher education degree.

You can view five of the six winning projects from this past weekend  here.  The last will be selected by the public. Learn about the finalists and cast your vote here.

Last week, Knight Foundation announced a $1 million grant to Mobilize.org to help build a network of young leaders in five communities, part of Knight’s efforts to promote informed and engaged communities.  Similar summits will take place soon in Charlotte, Detroit, Miami and Philadelphia.