Daring to dream BIG

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Imagine being surrounded by violence, drugs, teen pregnancy and a 50 percent high school dropout rate and still staying focused enough to earn a 4.33 grade-point average (A+)?

Ashley Jones and ReDonah Anderson, both 18, don't have to imagine. That scenario describes their east-of-the-Anacostia River neighborhood and their own ability to succeed in the midst of it.

"We know we want something better, something more. Going to college is part of that," says Miss Anderson, whose father was shot to death when she was 4 years old. "At Hoop Dreams, they talk about not letting your circumstances define you and to dream big."

Hoop Dreams? It's a District-based program that not only awards scholarships to deserving and economically disadvantaged students in Wards 7 and 8, but also provides them with professional mentors, SAT prep classes and internships of up to a year. Miss Anderson and Miss Jones are both Hoop Dreams scholarship recipients.

"When we started 10 years ago, the main focus was to raise scholarship funding to ensure that these bright kids had the resources they needed to go to college," says Susie Kay, founder of Hoop Dreams.

She founded the nonprofit group while teaching American government to 12th graders at H.D. Woodson High School in Ward 7. It began as a charity basketball tournament to raise scholarship money. (This is the only connection the group has to basketball other than being named after a 1994 Academy Award-nominated documentary by the same name.)

The group has grown since then, and Ms. Kay, whose work experience also includes being a Capitol Hill staffer, had to quit teaching several years ago to run the organization, which raises about $1.4 million a year. Each student receives $1,000 to $5,000 in scholarship money. Students can reapply for more money as long as they're in college.

"When I started Hoop Dreams, it was really an extension of what I was already doing, building bridges between the students' world and the world I would return home to every night," says Ms. Kay, who in the early and mid-1990s was the only white teacher at the school. "This was during the crack epidemic, the O.J. Simpson verdict. ... There was so much mistrust, and I wanted to do something about the huge disconnect between perception and reality. I wanted the two worlds to interact."

Money was a start, she says, but to be prepared for the world beyond their immediate surroundings, the students needed more than that.

"So we started the internship program and the mentoring," Ms. Kay says. "I learned that if students weren't ready for college and the outside world, they'd just boomerang," meaning not make it in the "real world" and just go back to what they knew.