[ghufran_syed]

I note that the student sign-up uses zip-code to try and classify low-income students. I live in the low-income part of a rich city (Menlo Park), and the whole city just has one zip code. This would exclude a lot of the low-income students who live in my neighborhood. I used to be a volunteer tutor with the local boys and girls clubs of America (bgca.org) chapter and the students who would attend there were exactly the demographic you’re targeting. I know you partner with some schools, but you might want to also consider using organizations like bgca as an alternative way of identifying these kids. You probably don’t want to go to the schools in this area and have them stigmatize the low income students by presenting the app as being just “for the poor kids”

[thedevelopnik]

Thanks for calling this out. It’s not that obvious, and we need to make some improvements, but there is a way to get access if you don’t qualify by zip code/school.

If a student does not automatically qualify, we offer them basically an appeal form where they can say how much their family makes among other things. And we do qualify a number of students that way.

Partnering with other orgs like BGCA is an awesome idea that I will pass to our outreach coordinator. Thank you!

[donw]

You probably want to start from this.

I grew up on the bottom rung of our local socioeconomic ladder, and self-selected out of a lot of potential opportunities because I knew I would be excluded.

[alymurray]

Do you mean that you didn't want to be labeled "low-income"? If so, I relate. There were definitely periods when I was growing up that I was eligible for free or reduced price lunch but was too embarrassed to accept it.

We try to avoid using the word "low-income" in all of our student-facing communications for exactly this reason. For example, this is how we talk about eligibility on the students' page of our website (https://upchieve.org/students):

"Is This Really Free? YES! UPchieve is a nonprofit organization that exists to help students achieve their academic goals. Any student whose family can’t afford a private tutor or admissions consultant is eligible for free tutoring and college counseling through UPchieve. Instead of charging you, we rely on volunteers and donations to provide you with free academic support."

One of my long-term goals with UPchieve is actually to destigmatize being a low-income student. It's obviously not the student's fault if their family can't afford something. (In fact, it's probably not their parents' fault either.) Not sure exactly how we'll do this yet, but I hope that we can :)