Dorson Community Foundation

Highly-motivated students from Essex County, NJ have dreams of college and career success. We invest in their futures.

Dorson Community Foundation (DCF) supports highly-motivated high school students with great potential, but unequal opportunities due to systemic inequities. We work to identify, recruit and develop these young people into happy and healthy humans - the next generation of leaders and agents of change their local communities need. Since 1992, DCF has served students from the Greater Newark, NJ area who are primarily students of color, the first generation of their family to earn a college degree, are from low-income backgrounds, and are motivated to achieve college and career success.

Through our college readiness and career development programming that uniquely emphasizes self-discovery and civic engagement, our vision is to develop our students into self-actualized individuals empowered by strong networks and social capital and the sense of civic responsibility necessary to become agents of change in their communities.

In 2019, DCF launched the Dorson Scholars Program, an intensive four-year, cohort-based, college and career readiness experience, providing year-round programming designed to nurture students on their paths to college and career success. The Program is anchored in the Dorson Scholars model comprising five core pillars: Self-Actualization; Post-secondary Exposure, Readiness, and Access; Career Awareness and Professional Development; Service-Learning and Community Engagement; and Transformative Summer Experiences.