WHEN SERGIO RODRIGUEZ CAMARENA ’16 was in the eighth grade, the unspoken truth about his immigration status suddenly loomed like an obstacle in his path. Until then, the ambitious student had never really experienced the downside of being undocumented.

“Because we have been undocumented, we’ve had to find ways to navigate around the system. So we have skills that not a lot of people have. Like thinking outside the box, you know, entrepreneurial skills. These are things that we never claim to have, but we do. And I think if institutions were investing in that, they would be investing in the future of America.” —Sergio Rodriguez Camarena ’16

Sergio is the only one of four siblings born in Mexico, and that was by design. He says his father wanted him to be a mariachi and “an authentic Mexican,” so he took the family back south of the border in time for his middle son’s arrival. But when they returned permanently to California in 2002, Sergio also became an authentic undocumented at age 9.
Soon afterwards, his parents separated, and Sergio stayed with his mother in Santa Ana, where the third-grader joined thousands of immigrant kids cramming classrooms in the predominantly Mexican-American city. He lacked the athletic skills of his brother and the desire to be a mariachi trumpet player like his grandfather. So the boy embraced his studies as a way to shine. Two years later, he graduated from Diamond Elementary School with the President’s Education Award, a national honor reserved for students with stellar academic records. Sergio, son of a seamstress, got a certificate and a letter signed by then President George W. Bush.

“Okay,” thought the fifth grader, “I’m going to better heights.”

And so he was. When it came time to make the big move to high school, Sergio was offered a full scholarship to an elite New England boarding school, Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. The privilege was provided through a program called A Better Chance, founded by the headmasters of 23 private schools seeking to increase enrollment of low-income, minority students.

Just one problem: on the application, Sergio failed to enter a Social Security number.
The omission was just automatic for him. Growing up, he had always been told: never provide your social security number, for any reason. This time, he excitedly asked his mother for the document, so he could complete his application. That’s when reality hit. He realized he couldn’t disclose his number because he didn’t have one.

Sergio was instructed not to talk to the school counselor any more. She called his home daily for a while, but he avoided her until the calls stopped. He says he felt embarrassed and demoralized, but the shame faded over the summer. In the fall, he enrolled at Santa Ana’s Segerstrom High School, with more than 80 percent Hispanic enrollment. And though he performed well there, taking several AP classes, he recalls having to fight against low expectations. One college counselor told him, “You know, you’re going to go to community college; you shouldn’t be working so hard.”

This fall, Rodriguez starts his senior year at Pomona College, one of a growing group of immigrant students successfully pursuing degrees and openly taking advantage of enrichment opportunities the campus has to offer. He just completed a semester of study abroad in Germany, and this summer he’s at Princeton University’s prestigious Woodrow Wilson School, doing a fellowship in public policy and international affairs, with future plans to become an immigration lawyer.

“Yeah, I feel I had a lot to prove,” says Rodriguez Camarena over lunch at Frary Dining Hall. “I wanted to come out of the Santa Ana community because everybody that was undocumented there was not getting the education that they wanted. They had the grades, they had the knowledge, they had everything. But once they start hearing that they’re illegal, that they’re aliens, that they’re criminals, it becomes like a mindset: ‘You can’t go further. You’re limited. You work this hard, but you just can’t.’ So they give up or they just fall into low wages—the path of least resistance. And I think that’s one of the biggest problems, because they start to internalize, as a setback. And I never did.

“To this point, nothing has really, like, derailed me.”

In that respect, Rodriguez Camarena is one of the lucky ones. An estimated 65,000 undocumented students graduate from U.S. high schools every year, according to a College Board report, but less than 10 percent go on to college, the vast majority of those at community colleges. In the past, illegal status kept college degrees out of reach for the so-called 1.5 generation, the children of first-generation immigrants brought here as minors, often before they could even grasp what it meant to be undocumented.

But in the past decade, students like Sergio have come out of those proverbial shadows to fight for change in immigration laws. They have opened new doors for themselves and have brought a new energy to campuses like Pomona that welcome them.

THE GREAT AWAKENING OF the immigrant community dates back to the fight against Proposition 187, the 1994 bill that could have forced undocumented children out of schools in California. It gained momentum in 2006 with the successful fight against the so-called “Sensenbrenner Bill,” with its onerous anti-immigrant provisions.

“In 2006, high school students were among the first to begin the protest, and in fact they served as a catalyst,” says Miguel Tinker Salas, professor of Latin American history and Chicano/ Latino/a studies. “Those students are the ones who today are in college. They are the generation that lost all fear because they took on a very public role. And they were able to push society to accept the fact that the immigrant issue is a civil rights issue, a human rights issue.”

Since the start of the century, much has changed for undocumented youth seeking higher education and a higher stake in American life. National efforts to legalize the status of young immigrant students dates back to the so-called DREAM Act, first introduced in Congress in 2001. That legislation, which stands for Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors, would have created a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who were brought here illegally as children and who go on to graduate from college. The bill has failed despite votes on multiple versions over the years.

That legislative failure prompted President Barack Obama to implement a stopgap measure called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. The White House order protects certain undocumented immigrants from deportation if they entered the country as minors, graduated from high school or are currently enrolled in school. Qualified candidates—nicknamed DACA-mented students—get renewable work permits but no path to permanent legal status. Symbolically, Obama announced the order on June 15, 2012, the 30th anniversary of a Supreme Court ruling that barred public schools from charging tuition for undocumented students.

Although DACA didn’t give so-called DREAMers all they hoped for, it did give them a foot in the door of the ivory tower. They were free to reveal their immigration status, and colleges were free to openly assist them. Today, there are all kinds of guides aimed at helping college-bound undocumented students. One website offers 10 tips for college counselors seeking to help them. Another offers a DREAMer’s Bag of Tools, pointing them to a wide range of resources, including financial aid. Even the College Board, known for the SAT test, devotes a webpage to undocumented students, with helpful features such as “6 Things Undocumented Students Need to Know About College.”

In 2008, Pomona College adopted a new policy toward undocumented applicants, who had previously been considered international students. Today, all students who graduate from U.S. high schools are treated exactly the same. That is, their admission is based entirely on merit and promise, without regard to their immigration status or their ability to pay. As with all other domestic students, if they can’t afford the cost, the College provides a financial aid package that meets their full need, up to the total cost of attendance.

The rationale for that generous policy was laid out two years later in the 2010 commencement address by Pomona President David W. Oxtoby. “This country benefits from the ideas, the skills and the hard work of those who do or do not bear proper documents,” said Oxtoby in calling for passage of the DREAM Act. “…So as you leave today with a very important document in your hands—a Pomona College diploma—do not forget the others who surround you who are undocumented. It is our responsibility to work together to achieve justice and opportunity for all.”

Currently, there are some 50 undocumented students at Pomona, about three percent of total enrollment. That’s higher than most private colleges, according to Vice President and Dean of Students Miriam Feldblum, an immigration scholar. And personally, she hopes the number will grow.

The immigration issue hits close to home for Feldblum, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who came to this country after World War II.

“So it has a very personal resonance for me,” she says. “We want to be the destination of choice for highly talented students, regardless of their immigration status. These students are part of the American fabric… And what we see is that there are some amazing, highly talented students who bring such important experiences and life stories that enrich us and that will certainly help Pomona achieve its goals of graduating the next generation of leaders, scholars and activists.”

“My mom is always like, ‘Don’t worry, something will come up. You just have to keep trying.’ She’s always positive. Both she and my dad have that mentality, so it really helps. They’ve always been really optimistic, even though my status restricts a lot of opportunities for me.” —Jacqueline Fernandez ’16

JACQUELINE FERNANDEZ ’16 says her grandfather and uncles originally came here from Mexico as farmworkers under the bracero program, which allowed U.S. growers to import temporary workers to fill labor shortages during the ’40s and ’50s. Her parents hail originally from the state of Guerrero, one of the poorest and most violent states in Mexico. They moved to Mexico City, and her father dropped out of school to work in his family’s small, neighborhood grocery store. Her mother dropped her studies and career plans when her daughter was born, a sacrifice that put pressure on Jacqueline to succeed in school.

The family came to the United States when Fernandez was four years old, and they settled in Santa Ana. Coincidentally, like Rodriguez Camarena, she also entertained the chance of going to a private high school through A Better Chance, but was also stymied by her lack of a Social Security number. Her biggest disappointment, however, came in her junior year when her illegal status prevented her from participating in a paid summer internship through Project SELF (Summer Employment in Law Firm), designed to give real-life courtroom experience to low-to-middle-income Santa Ana kids.

She cried hard when she realized she didn’t qualify. As always, it was her parents who helped her overcome.

“My mom is always like, ‘Don’t worry, something will come up. You just have to keep trying.’ She’s always positive. Both my dad and she have that mentality, so it really helps. They’ve always been really optimistic, even though my status restricts a lot of opportunities for me.”

Fernandez learned the lesson well. When it came time to apply to college, she redoubled her efforts to find schools that accept undocumented students and provide financial aid. She found Pomona through QuestBridge, a Palo Alto-based program that matches low-income students with college and scholarship opportunities.

It’s notable that several of these students often single out their mothers as the ones who motivated, supported and inspired them. They say their mothers have been role models of determination, generosity, and community solidarity.

Rodriguez Camarena, who also came to Pomona through QuestBridge, insisted on using both his surnames for this story, identifying paternal and maternal lineage in the Latino custom. He is estranged from his father, so this is his way of honoring his mother, whose maiden name is Camarena. He says she left a teaching job in Mexico and worked here as a seamstress so he could have the education and professional career she had sacrificed. “I always tell this to people: I’m not the dreamer. My mom’s the dreamer.”

“I found so many mentors, professors and people coming from different back-grounds that are so willing to talk to you, and have compas-sion for issues they haven’t really experienced before,” —Hong Deng Gao ’15

FOR HONG DENG GAO ’15, a Chinese student from New York, the tragedy is that her mother didn’t live to see her graduate this year with an armful of honors, including top prizes in history. But her parents’ hard labor in the grueling immigrant industries of New York’s Chinatown inspired her to leave a valuable academic legacy in their honor.

Gao says her parents didn’t speak English when they arrived in this country, and neither did she. The girl was about to enter middle school when she was brought here on a tourist visa and a false promise to return. Her parents didn’t tell her that the travel plan was a pretense. Once here, she learned she wasn’t going home. For a pre-teen in any culture, that comes as a shock.

Her parents could only find work in Manhattan’s Chinese ghetto, where language was not a barrier. Conditions were brutish, with low pay, long hours and no sick leave or health insurance. Her father toiled as a dishwasher in Chinese restaurants, working 12 hours a day. Her mother at first took a job making dumplings in a basement sweat shop, a tiny room with no windows.

People were getting sick because of the relentless stress at work. Her mother quit and switched to doing manicures, but constantly inhaling the chemical fumes became unbearable. So she started selling fruit at an outdoor fruit stand, hot in the summer and bone-chillingly cold in the winter. At some point, her mother’s frail body started to show worrisome symptoms, itchy skin and yellow eyes, signs of liver disease. “But she still insisted on going to work, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to pay our rent,” recalls Gao. American doctors were too expensive so her mother consulted Chinese healers who gave her “bone medicine.”

“She got worse,” Gao says. “One time she fainted on the street and she was picked up by the ambulance. She was not conscious. My dad and I were contacted and we were in the ambulance, but with our limited English skills we couldn’t communicate what’s going on, or understand what they were asking us. There was no one who spoke Chinese in the emergency room.”

Realizing her condition was life threatening, her mother quit her job. Three years ago this spring, while Gao was taking her final exams, she got word that her mother was dying.

At Pomona, Gao turned the family’s helplessness into activism.

As part of the school’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program, she traveled cross-country to explore the link between blue-collar immigration and white-tablecloth dining. The research culminated in her history thesis examining restaurants and race relations, titled: “Three upscale Chinese restaurants in Honolulu, San Francisco and New York.” Her advisor, History Professor Samuel Yamashita, has called the thesis “groundbreaking” and has praised Gao as “one of the most remarkable students I have taught in my 36-year career.”

This year, Gao launched Health Bridges, a program that trains bilingual college volunteers to help immigrant patients at local hospitals. The goal is to assist non-English speakers to navigate the health system more successfully. The program grew out of her work at the Draper Center for Community Partnerships, which fosters interaction between the campus and the outside community.

It’s being launched with a $12,000 grant from the Napier Initiative, awarded to students from The Claremont Colleges whose programs show leadership in promoting social change. Gao, who believes her mother may have survived with better access to health care, hopes to expand the program nationally.

Upon graduation this year, Gao received the coveted Ada May Fitts Prize, for graduating women who show “outstanding intellectual leadership and influence on other students at the College.” That’s a high honor for the once shy freshman who found it hard to even speak to her fellow students.

Gao remembers that she missed the usual campus orientations for incoming freshmen. But she did receive a letter from Dean Feldblum referring identified undocumented students to resources on campus. That’s how she found the Draper Center and met student mentor Diana Ortiz, co-founder of IDEAS (Improving Dreams Equality Access and Success), a nonprofit that helps foster better awareness of the immigrant community on campus. Ortiz urged Gao to get involved and come to meetings, where she learned to open up.

“When I first came here I was just shocked,” says Gao. “Latino students are so much more open about their undocumented status, especially in California. It’s kind of not a thing to do for Chinese or Asian students. I mean, that’s the stereotype, and I would say it’s true, at least for me. I kept things to myself. So it was very inspiring to hear their stories, and it really encouraged me to share mine and just put in my voice.”

AS A CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE, the cause of undocumented students is often compared to the gay rights movement. Coming out as undocumented, revealing what was formerly kept secret, has been empowering. Instead of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” today’s undocumented students seem to embrace a policy of transparency: “Go ahead and ask. We’ve got a lot to say.”

In interviews for this article, half a dozen immigrant students at Pomona spoke candidly about the problems they’ve encountered—not unlike those many of their fellow students may have faced. They have struggled with difficult family issues: divorces, absent fathers, domestic violence, sibling rivalries. They have faced serious life challenges: poverty, illness, death.

Despite the challenges—or perhaps because of them—these students display many of the strengths found by researchers to be common among immigrants. As a group, they are highly motivated by the desire to prove themselves. They are extremely appreciative of the opportunities they’ve been given. They are determined, many of them, to use their college training to benefit the communities they come from.

And finally, they don’t always see their immigrant experience as a deficit. The challenges and extreme hardships their parents had to overcome often instill a can-do spirit that is actually very American. Obstacles? Go around them. Setbacks? Get over them. Critics and naysayers? Ignore them.

“The one cool thing about undocumented students,” says Rodriguez Camarena, “is that, because we have been undocumented, we’ve had to find ways to navigate around the system. So we have skills that not a lot of people have. Like thinking outside the box, you know, entrepreneurial skills. These are things that we never claim to have, but we do. And I think if institutions were investing in that, they would be investing in the future of America.”

IT’S A CHILLY MARCH morning in Manhattan—the kind of grey, slushy Wednesday that can make even the most optimistic New Yorker wonder if winter will ever end. But for Bill Keller ’70, it might as well be spring.

The previous weekend, Keller’s former employer, The New York Times, ran a 7,500-word article about the brutal beating in 2011 of an inmate by guards at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Three of the guards were scheduled to stand trial on Monday for multiple felonies, including first-degree gang assault. All had rejected plea bargains.

The story was reported by investigative journalist Tom Robbins for The Marshall Project, the nonprofit digital news outlet dedicated to criminal justice issues that Keller has edited since it launched in November of last year; and it was posted to the Times and Marshall Project websites before appearing on the front page of the newspaper’s Sunday print edition, complete with striking photos by Times photographers Chang Lee and Damon Winter. (Keller, who has been a trustee of the College since 2000, says he spent “a lot of time” dashing in and out of a board meeting in Claremont the previous Friday, shepherding the piece through publication.) On Tuesday, Robbins and Times reporter Lauren D’Avolio filed another story: all three guards had suddenly accepted a deal from prosecutors, pleading guilty to a single misdemeanor and quitting their jobs in order to avoid jail time.

From a purely journalistic perspective, the two articles packed quite a wallop, reverberating across the Internet and stimulating commentary in a variety of other media. And it’s not inconceivable that the first, lengthy story helped create the environment that made the second, shorter one come to pass; maybe, Keller mused in his Midtown office, a series of masks representing former Russian leaders gazing down at him from the wall, the guards decided to accept a plea deal because the weekend feature made it clear that prosecutors had a strong case against them.

Click for a larger version.

The Marshall Project was founded by Neil Barsky, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, documentary filmmaker, and hedge-fund manager whose interest in criminal justice was piqued a couple of years ago by two books: Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which examines the mass incarceration of African Americans; and Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove, about Thurgood Marshall’s defense of four young black men who were falsely accused in 1949 of raping a white woman. (The Marshall Project was named for the late Supreme Court justice.) Barsky was raised in a politically active household—both parents were involved in the civil rights movement—and he retains a belief in the power of journalism to effect social change. He also feels that the American public has become inured to the fact that the nation’s criminal justice system is, as he says, “scandalously messed up.” So he decided to use digital journalism to lend the subject of criminal justice reform the urgency it deserves. “The status quo is not defensible,” Barsky says. “The country needs to see this issue like the house is on fire.”

Barsky didn’t know Keller personally, but in June 2014, he shot him an email to see if he might be interested in signing on as editor-in-chief. The two met for breakfast; Keller agreed; and then, as Barsky puts it, “all hell broke loose.”

“Bill’s hiring put us on the map right away with funders and with other reporters and editors who wanted to work with us,” Barsky says. It also stirred up a great deal of media attention, with articles about Keller, Barsky and The Marshall Project appearing long before the site actually launched.

This should come as no surprise. Keller is one of the most familiar and respected figures in American print journalism: Over the course of his 30 years at the Times, he won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the fall of the Soviet Union; served as bureau chief in South Africa during the end of apartheid; held the position of executive editor for eight years; and ended his run at the paper as a columnist. His decision to move to a nonprofit digital enterprise evoked comparisons with Paul Steiger, who left his job as managing editor of the Wall Street Journal to found ProPublica, now the largest and best-known nonprofit digital newsroom in the country; and it generated a commensurate amount of buzz.

For Keller, running an editorial staff of 20 after several years of solitary column writing represented a welcome return to what he calls the “adrenaline and collegiality” of chasing news. Just as importantly, it meant working in an area where there was a real opportunity to effect change—there is broad bipartisan support for criminal justice reform these days—and to practice accountability journalism, probing public institutions to see if they are fulfilling their responsibilities. This, he adds, is distinct from advocacy: The Marshall Project does not promote specific legislative reforms, nor does it take a moral stand on issues like drug policy or capital punishment. (He does admit, however, that walking the line between advocacy and accountability can sometimes be uncomfortable, and says that he must occasionally keep his staff from crossing it; but as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once memorably said of pornography, Keller claims to know advocacy when he sees it.)

Bill Keller ’70 at the New York office of the Marshall Project

There was also, Keller says, a certain appeal to building an organization from scratch, without the ample safety net afforded by The New York Times, and in managing a relatively small operation. “I can talk to pretty much everyone on my staff if I want to, which is nice,” Keller says—and presumably quite different from the Times, where he edited a staff of 1,250.

In fact, Keller had just come from The Marshall Project’s weekly editorial meeting. A clutch of reporters and editors crowded into Barsky’s office in his absence, some sitting on the floor, others taking up positions on top of a low-slung filing cabinet. Keller presided with genial authority, asking questions, soliciting opinions, and sifting the criminal justice news of the day for potential stories.

That news, as anyone with eyes to see or ears to hear can attest, has been coming thick and fast of late. The Marshall Project was conceived before Eric Garner died while being subdued by police officers in New York City; before Michael Brown and Walter Scott were fatally shot by police officers in Ferguson, Mo., and North Charleston, S.C.; and before Freddie Gray died of injuries sustained while in police custody in Baltimore. And it came into being as those and similar events sparked what has been described as the most significant American civil rights movement of the 21st century, inspiring a concomitant deluge of stories about crime, punishment and America’s failure to manage either one particularly well.

But criminal justice has always represented an unusually rich vein of material for investigative journalists, and that, too, appealed to Keller. The sheer scope of the topic was evident at the Wednesday meeting: Andrew Cohen, who edits “Opening Statement,” the site’s morning e-newsletter, talked about the release of a report by the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing; news editor Raha Naddaf described a possible collaboration with a highly regarded print magazine on deteriorating conditions at New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex; and Keller brought up the case of the Kettles Fall Five, a group of medical marijuana growers in Washington State who face federal drug charges. There was talk of immigration law, of data-driven reporting, and of recent revelations regarding just what kinds of information federal prosecutors are obliged to share with defense attorneys.

Several of those stories would make their way onto the site over the next month or so, as would a dizzying array of others. Indeed, in a single week in late April, The Marshall Project ran pieces that dissected the career of Baltimore police commissioner Anthony Batts; examined the treatment of transgender inmates and investigated standards of care for diabetic ones; considered the miserable record of the FBI’s forensics labs and the long-term efficacy of reforms imposed on local police forces by the Department of Justice; and invited readers to take a quiz to find out which are killed more humanely: pets or prisoners. (Answer: pets.) “For a niche subject, this is a very big niche,” says Keller, who together with staff writer Beth Schwartzapfel filed a story in mid-May about Willie Horton, the convicted murderer and rapist whom George H.W. Bush used to pummel Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election.

Much of the site’s original reporting covers topics that remain underreported elsewhere, or provides added context to ones that are already trending. There’s no denying that the latter have proliferated wildly over the past year or so: “Opening Statement” typically includes links to pieces produced not only by other criminal justice outlets like The Crime Report and The Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, but also by publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Guardian; a host of independent blogs and progressive news sites; and just about every major newspaper in the United States.

The attention currently being paid to criminal justice represents a sharp reversal following years of declining coverage. That decline, says Stephen Handelman, who edits The Crime Report and directs the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, resulted from two principal phenomena: falling crime rates, which made the topic a “spectator sport” for many middle-class Americans; and turmoil in the news business, which led to a reduction in resources, including the number of reporters with the knowledge and experience required to tackle complex criminal justice stories. Despite the proliferation of digital tools for gathering and distributing news and information, solid investigative reporting still requires old-fashioned shoe-leather, which in turn requires both time and its correlate, money. And investigative reporting that focuses on criminal justice stories that may unfold over weeks or months or even years—stories that require reporters to scrutinize sprawling institutions like the federal court system or state correctional facilities and that involve untangling the complex web of legal, social and political factors at play in issues like the mass incarceration of black men, the detention of undocumented immigrants, the war on drugs and the use of prisons as holding pens for the mentally ill—requires a lot of both.

Which brings us, inevitably, to the “nonprofit” part of “nonprofit digital news outlet.” The word is by no means a synonym for impoverished; some of the most robust news organizations in the country (NPR, The Associated Press) are nonprofits. Nonetheless, there are concerns about the long-term prospects of the smaller digital nonprofits that sprouted like mushrooms in the wake of the Great Recession, when the short-term prospects of traditional news media appeared to be particularly dismal. A 2013 study of 172 nonprofit digital news outlets by the Pew Research Center suggested a guardedly optimistic attitude, with most reporting that they were in the black. But the study also found that many of those same outlets were reliant on one-time seed grants from foundations, and lacked sufficient resources to pursue the marketing and fundraising activities that could help them become more financially stable. “Nonprofit journalism isn’t going away any time soon,” says Jesse Holcomb, a senior researcher at the center who worked on the report. “But that doesn’t mean there’s been a tipping point in terms of achieving a sustainable approach.”

Research by the Knight Foundation indicates that the most successful nonprofit news organizations seek to diversify their funding; invest in marketing, business development and fundraising; and build partnerships with other organizations to expand their audiences and bolster their brands. Judging by those criteria, The Marshall Project appears to be on solid footing. The site has a long list of donors, some of whom have committed funds for two or three years, and a dedicated business staff. Keller and Barsky are considering a wide range of alternative revenue sources, including memberships, conferences, and sponsorships—though advertising might be a tougher row to hoe. (“Advertisers aren’t dying to advertise their products next to stories about prison rape,” Keller says.) And thanks no doubt in part to the Keller Effect, the site is not hurting for partners.

In addition to the Attica piece, The Marshall Project has published stories in conjunction with The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Vice, which Keller describes as “a direct pipeline to a younger audience.” It also has projects in the works with 60 Minutes and This American Life, and is in talks with several other outlets, including Stars and Stripes, The Weather Channel, and the statistics-driven news site 538.org.

In some ways, Keller says, it’s easier to do everything yourself. But collaborations with other outlets help build the site’s credibility, and allow it to leverage the resources of different organizations. (The Times, for example, contributed photography to the Attica piece, which can be costly, while other partners might provide legal services or help cover travel expenses.) Most importantly, such partnerships ensure that The Marshall Project’s reporting, which Keller describes as “journalism with a purpose,” will reach the largest possible audience.

“The aim,” says Keller, “is to get these issues onto the larger stage. And for that, you need a megaphone.”

GET HER GOING, and Jessica Ladd ’08 will talk effusively about her many positive Pomona memories, from late-night sponsor-group discussions about free will to sunny study sessions on Walker Beach.

In many ways, Pomona directly inspired her career path. She created her own major in public policy and human sexuality, writing her thesis on condom distribution in California prisons and jails. She turned The Student Life’s often-lewd sex column into a thoughtful exploration of topics such as virginity, safe sex and consent.

Perhaps most pivotally, and certainly most traumatically, Pomona was also the place where she was sexually assaulted.

The incident itself was harrowing, but its aftermath was in some respects even more traumatizing. Ladd found herself unsure of how to go about doing basic things like finding emergency contraception and confidentially getting tested for STDs. Worse still, in reporting the assault she felt like a passive and helpless participant, from the tone of campus security’s questioning to uncertainty about how her answers would be used.

“Instead of feeling empowered, I left the situation on the verge of tears,” she says. “It made me realize that many of the tools for improving the process didn’t exist, and sowed the seeds for wanting to create a better way.”

As founder and CEO of Sexual Health Innovations (SHI), Ladd has developed a tool called Callisto that is aimed at making survivors feel more comfortable reporting their experiences. This fall, two institutions will adopt the technology, including the very place where Ladd’s frustrating but illuminating journey first started.

Sexual assault is consistently one of our country’s most under-reported crimes, with upwards of 80 to 90 percent of incidents going undocumented. The reasons range from logistical, to social, to psychological. Victims may be afraid people will think they are lying or exaggerating; they may worry that accusing their acquaintances will ostracize them from social circles; and they may be scared to publicly re-live the experience in a trial where their credibility and character are continuously questioned.

“Because survivors have had their agency stripped in such a severe way, they often feel hesitant to give information to authorities if they think they might lose that agency all over again,” says Ladd, who herself took over a year to report. “We’re trying to create a trauma-informed system that gives them total control over the process.”

Callisto- a tool to help with reporting sexual assault

Callisto lets users file an incident report that can be sent directly to authorities or archived for later. Users can also choose a third option: saving the report such that it only gets filed if their attacker is separately reported by another user.

It’s a clever feature, and not a trivial one. Ladd often cites a 2002 study which found that 90 percent of campus assaults are committed by repeat perpetrators; she’s confident that Callisto has the potential not only to improve the reporting process, but perhaps even to reduce the number of assaults that happen in the first place.

“If authorities could stop perpetrators after their second assault, 60 percent of assaults could be prevented,” Ladd says. “Callisto isn’t the complete answer, but I think it can be a valuable piece in the puzzle.”

One reason to bet on Callisto is that it was developed with direct input from more than 100 college sexual-assault survivors and advocates, in the form of several months’ worth of surveys, focus groups and interviews.

Among the participants was Zoe Ridolfi-Starr, who last year organized a Title IX federal complaint against Columbia University arguing that the institution treats survivors and alleged assailants unequally. She says that, with Callisto, it was clear from the start that SHI truly understood its audience’s needs.

“Survivors can find it overwhelming enough to try to maneuver through all that red-tape before you even add things like PTSD and depression into the mix,” she says. “SHI has shown that they want to go about the process in a way that’s inclusive, intuitive and intentional.”

Callisto’s sleek interface is designed to make it easy to wade through the murky waters of bureaucracy. Questions have explanatory “help text” to clarify why they are being asked and how answers will be used, while the language is chosen with care and sensitivity. For instance, a question about how much the victim had been drinking is couched in reassurances that such answers do not put her or him at fault and will not, say, get her or him in trouble with the school for violating its alcohol policy.

The system’s development has coincided with sexual assault emerging as perhaps the most-discussed issue in all of higher education, from President Obama’s recent “It’s On Us” initiative to the Columbia University student who carried a mattress all year to protest the school’s handling of her assault allegations.

“As far back as 2013, we realized that if there ever was a time for schools to change their programs, it’s now,” Ladd says. “In the past, adopting this might have seemed like an admission that assault is prevalent on campus. Today, it’s seen as forward-thinking.”

The issue has gained prominence even beyond academia, particularly with the many allegations against comedian Bill Cosby. Ladd says that, while such visibility can be valuable, the growing list of women who have spoken out only further highlights the importance of systems like Callisto for survivors who don’t want to go public, or whose assailants aren’t famous entertainers.

“People shouldn’t have to out themselves to the world to get justice,” she says. “Callisto is a service that we’d eventually like to make available to anyone who needs it.”

Ladd’s interest in sexual health evolved from her upbringing on San Francisco’s Castro Street, where she says that it “always seemed like the city around me was dying of AIDS.” An early clouds-parting moment happened in a high school production of “The Vagina Monologues,” when she first learned that there was such a thing as a clitoris.

“It felt as though the world had been conspiring to not let me know about it,” she says. “It made me wonder, ‘what else are they hiding from me?’”

Since then she has dipped her toes into several different sexual-health-related sectors—as an educator, an academic, a policy advocate and even a White House intern—but says that she became disenchanted with all of these approaches as means to actually effect change.

Instead, she looked at companies like Facebook and Google, and realized that a key way to influence people was through technology.

“The Internet allows people to do things that they would normally find socially awkward, from looking at porn and buying sex toys to propositioning threesomes on Craigslist,” she says. “We’ve harnessed that power to make ourselves happier, but why not use it to make ourselves safer and healthier, too?”

Callisto is the flagship initiative for SHI, which Ladd founded while enrolled full-time in Johns Hopkins’ public-health MPH program. SHI has grown from a makeshift website coded by volunteers to a full-fledged 501(c)(3) nonprofit with bi-coastal offices and more than a quarter-million dollars in funding from Google.

This fall, in efforts that are more than a year in the making, Ladd will launch Callisto at two “Founding Institutions”—Pomona and the University of San Francisco.

“We want to make sure that students feel comfortable reporting sexual assaults when they happen,” says Pomona Associate Dean and Title IX Coordinator Daren Mooko. “Callisto is a very creative mechanism for doing so, in a way that puts a lot of control in the survivor’s hands.”

Ladd says she didn’t come into SHI with particularly entrepreneurial intentions, but simply with a problem that she wanted to solve.

“This is something that I have long believed should exist in the world,” she says. “At a certain point I realized that, while I can’t change what happened to me, what I can do is build something that will hopefully help the next person who’s in that same situation.”