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Meet Elizabeth Paulus of College Bound AZ in East Valley

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Elizabeth Paulus.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
In 2009, I had the opportunity to work with a local high school senior who needed help to complete their financial aid for college. It opened my eyes to the challenges and barriers faced by low-income families to get into college even though the student is academically qualified. Getting into college is a process with multiple steps which requires a background of knowledge usually supplied by an older, experienced person such as a parent or a mentor. Low-income families don’t share this kind of cultural knowledge. My casual association with this student changed into a much deeper commitment because the barriers continued through the first year of college in so many ways. The barriers included the inability to afford books, the social adjustment to a very foreign environment, and a misunderstanding that lead to the student acquiring a school debt that if not paid would have prevented continuing with a second semester. I had been a student like her, struggling to overcome my own barriers. With the successful completion of my college, I achieved a stability through steady employment I had not previously known. I could very much appreciate the significance of helping another achieve their educational goal. I began to research my area’s demographics and learned how many students were on the Free-or-Reduced Lunch Program, a common metric to denote a low-income status. It was more than half, a shocking statistic to me.

I had recently retired from my full-time job at the city of Phoenix as an environmental specialist and had time to contemplate what this series of events meant for me. They shaped my next decision: develop a program that could help remove the barriers to higher education for low-income students. Since more than half the students needed a mentor or an experienced person to assist them, I taught myself the college going process. My own college journey resulted in a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from ASU in 1988, many, many years earlier. I had some catching up to do! I didn’t have a background in activism, but I believe I was strongly influenced by the movie “The Blind Side” which showed what it looks like to mentor a young person from a low-income background. There was also my church, which placed that little voice inside my head that kept repeating, “Just do it!” And then there was my own story of starting my adult like in other than ideal circumstances.

As a senior in a Chicago suburb high school in 1975, I wondered about what came next. Perhaps I was more restless than the next kid, but I had been writing to a family on a farm in Washington State who had advertised in in the magazine “Mother Earth News” for a volunteer farm hand in exchange for room and board. After I graduated high school, living at home was not a workable situation any more. I ended up leaving home with a suitcase and $3, and hitchhiking to that farm in Washington State. I was 18 years old. It was an apple farm where I picked fruit but I was also expected to cook and clean. It was a family of four in Manson, WA who were very kind. While I lived in a detached building and was comfortable, I had zero income. With very few options, I enlisted in the US Army, ultimately serving 31 years between active duty and the reserves and retiring as a lieutenant colonel. The military paid for college as they had the generation before me. I often wonder where I might be had I not completed college. My point: education matters. It changes lives. Now fully retired, it became a mission for me and with my husband’s support, College Bound AZ resulted.

Has it been a smooth road?
Naively I plunged ahead forming a non-profit with no background at all – not in business and not in the non-profit world. In my first year, another college-going program partnered with me to share grant funds which helped out for 3 years. During that time a foundation was established for operating and working with students. I learned the hard way that all grants eventually sunset, and I didn’t know how to go about securing new funds. We made a family decision to donate the necessary funds while trying to grow new funding sources. That is very hard work with lots of rejections to weather. During one board meeting fraught with frustration, the chair quit as did most of the other board members, one by one. News travels fast, and I believe we were viewed by many with great skepticism. There were no grants to be had for 3 years. The parent organization that had incubated the program by providing local grant money and bookkeeping support cleaved us off. Yet every year students went on to college. God bless my husband who made me hang in there. Slowly we added to the board and to our donor base. After a very difficult 5 years we have been able to reduce our family contribution because of the new funding resources. A diverse funding source is the key to sustainable operations. The number of low-income families continues to creep up in our community, and the need for higher education continues to be our driving force.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
I am the Executive Director with a known passion for education. What I am most known for is the length of time for staying in contact with students to provide them support. Our program has garnered more than $1,000,000 in scholarships for our students. I’ve been at it so long we now see students who have graduated college and are remaining in our community to join the workforce. Now that’s exciting – 123 have gone to college with 20 finishing, turning their dreams into degrees. I have had students from 7th grade all the way through high school. At the graduations, I give those students a collage of themselves of photos taken since they were 13 years old with the inscription, “You have built the dream. Now let the dream build you.”

To create a high quality program I also felt I needed to know more about the overall learning process of students to ensure the workshops were effective, so I went back to college after 30 years and obtained a Masters of Education in May 2018 from Upper Iowa University. I have immersed myself so completely in the college-going process I had a board member who is also the parent of a teenager call me “the google of college knowledge”. And the kids keep going to college.

Is our city a good place to do what you do?
Finding partners that want to support the program’s success has been hard in this community. Partly this is because many are unaware of the barriers that exist because those barriers tend to be hidden: immigration status, food scarcity, low-income status, two parents working multiple jobs, and unstable housing. It takes leadership that is forward thinking which is not evident in local government in my opinion.

I recently uncovered a lot of valuable resources through our Chamber of Commerce which made me wish I had started there much earlier to develop a network of support. I even joined the Chamber in the next town over and found a similar cornucopia of resources there such as free web space for press releases, training on various business issues, and even a business coach provided free of charge. An entrepreneur has a vast resource at their fingertips through the Chambers of Commerce.

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