Project MALES (Mentoring to Achieve Latino Educational Success) is multi-faceted research and mentoring initiative based within the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement (DDCE) at the University of Texas at Austin. In the fall of 2010, Dr. Victor B. Saenz (Associate Professor, UT-Austin) — with support from co-founders Dr. Luis Ponjuan (Associate Professor, Texas A&M University) and Dr. William Serrata (President, El Paso Community College) — officially launched this ambitious new effort to shed greater light on the plight of Latino males in Education. Presently, Project MALES is lead by Dr. Saenz and Dr. Ponjuan, and Dr. Emmet Campos, Director. Project MALES encompasses three interrelated initiatives with national, state, and local impact: nationally, it oversees an ongoing research agenda focused on understanding the experiences of Latino males across the education pipeline; statewide, it convenes a P-16 Consortium focused on the success of male students of color in six major urban areas through its Texas Educational Consortium for Male Students of Color; and locally, it coordinates a mentoring program that aims to cultivate an engaged support network for males of color at UT-Austin and in school districts across the Central Texas community, and serve as a model for other mentoring programs across the state.
Project MALES embodies praxis by fusing these initiatives through strategies that employ mentoring, research, collective impact, and dissemination. For example, our mentoring model emerged directly from our research findings, and it highlights near-peer and intergenerational mentoring as a way to leverage social capital among Latino males across multiple generations. Our Project MALES Student Mentoring Program has a strong focus on mentoring, leadership development, community engagement, and collective impact, all of which serve to address the goal of enhancing the overall academic success and retention of male students of color in both secondary and post-secondary education. Our strategy to forge partnerships across the educational spectrum through our Consortium embraces the philosophy of collective impact to wield even greater influence over the policy imperative. Ultimately, Project MALES is focused on the goal of enhancing Latino male student success at all levels of the educational spectrum.
