Trinity Selected for College Service Grant to Empower Young Changemakers funded by The Allstate Foundation
For its commitment to youth-driven service and youth development, Trinity College has received a $10,000 College Service Grant from The Allstate Foundation in collaboration with the Center for Expanding Leadership & Opportunity (CELO).
This funding will be used to further youth-led, youth-driven service and is a part of The Allstate Foundation’s national strategy to transform how to engage, equip, and prepare young people to participate in community service. To date, the Foundation has granted over $1 million to youth-led service programs at campuses across the country.
“The Allstate Foundation believes that empowering youth to lead service is key to improving our communities and creating lasting change. These grants catalyze youth service opportunities by increasing access, deepening quality, and putting dollars behind young people’s innovative and transformational ideas about how to strengthen their communities,” said Greg Weatherford II, Director, The Allstate Foundation and Social Impact.
Funding for Trinity College is part of the “A Return to Service” initiative designed to catalyze change while positioning youth-led, youth-driven service as essential for improving communities. This grant will enable Trinity to support its Writing Center’s community efforts in Trinity’s Prison Education Project (TPEP) at the Hartford Correctional Center (HCC) and working with local high school students through Trinfo, a neighborhood community space.
The Writing Center is a resource for Trinity students where specially trained student tutors work with their fellow students on any kind of writing. To extend this work into the broader Hartford community, The Writing Center has partnered with TPEP to offer writing support for incarcerated individuals taking college credit classes at HCC. The Writing Center also has partnered with Trinity’s Center for Hartford Engagement and Research (CHER) to offer writing support at Trinfo to Hartford area high school students as they prepare to apply to college.
“We, at The Writing Center, like our partners at TPEP and CHER, feel that education is fundamental to the strengthening of individuals and communities, and we look to expand that empowerment for the benefit of us all as citizens of the city of Hartford,” said James C. Truman, director of peer tutoring in writing and senior lecturer in Trinity’s Allan K. Smith Center for Writing and Rhetoric. “At The Writing Center, our motto is, ‘If you write, you belong here,’ and are we excited for the opportunity to expand that sense of belonging and empowerment to writers throughout our Hartford community. This project has been led by student-tutors who are invested in issues of social justice—three of whom co-founded the organization Students Against Mass Incarceration—and our students look forward to developing tutoring and writing support with other interested Hartford area partners with the support of this grant.”
Trinity student Caitlin Doherty ’26 said that extending her work as a tutor at The Writing Center to HCC has been one of the most rewarding experiences of her time at Trinity. “Throughout the past year, I have seen so much positive development between myself, my fellow tutors, and TPEP students since we started this program,” Doherty said. “At its core, the partnership between The Writing Center and TPEP is about extending an academic service that all on-campus students can access to a group of Trinity students in a nontraditional setting. I am incredibly grateful to be a part of this work with TPEP students, my fellow tutors, and Dr. Truman.”
The Allstate Foundation College Service Grant allows Trinity to further champion youth-led, youth-driven service projects that address critical community challenges. By placing youth at the forefront of these initiatives, the institution aims to encourage them to harness their unique perspectives and talents to increase their impact. This strategy not only produces more effective and relatable solutions but also builds a generation of confident, capable leaders committed to lifelong service.
About The Allstate Foundation
The Allstate Foundation empowers people and communities so they can thrive. Established in 1952, The Foundation takes bold actions and inspires people to act by empowering youth to serve and improve communities, working to close the racial wage gap, and disrupting the cycle of relationship abuse. The Foundation also supports nonprofit leaders through the Nonprofit Leadership Center.
About the Center for Expanding Leadership & Opportunity (CELO)
CELO is a nonprofit committed to a world where high-quality youth development opportunities are distributed as equally as the abundance of talent in our communities. Emerging from nearly two decades of groundbreaking research and incubated at The Aspen Institute, CELO bridges the gap between academia and practice to accelerate youth development and deliver on the promise of greater impact.
