Changemaker Catalyst Award recipient Abigail Huddleston has spent the past year working with RoboRecovery, a Tulane based non-profit, to provide disadvantaged New Orleans students with hands-on robotics experiences. Abigail is a rising sophomore at Tulane, and is majoring in Neuroscience and Microbiology, with minors in Spanish and Public Health.

The New Orleans school system is comprised of nearly 44,000 students, with more than 80 percent of these students coming from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and more than 92 percent of these students identifying as people of color. Following Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans public school system underwent a complete reshaping. The entire public-school model was abandoned, and more than 7,000 teachers were fired. Since then, the city has adopted an application-based enrollment system in place of their original boundary policy. These new admissions policies have created an educational gap between the priviledged minority, and the overwhelmingly disadvantaged majority population. The application system as well as the monopolization of privatized schools, has created an environment in which those with priviledge can flourish, while the bulk of New Orleans schools are left with next to no funding, resources, or faculty. Additionally, because of the new charter-based school system, many of the newly hired teachers spend only a couple of years in their position and move roles or schools, before gaining the chance to truly connect with their community and their students. These policy shifts have exacerbated existent educational gaps by further disadvantaging some of New Orleans neediest students. These many varying challenges have created an environment in which many students are overlooked and do not receive the attention, care, and help that they need. Founded in 2022 to help combat this issue, RoboRecovery is a 501c3 non-profit that works to provide free after-school programming to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. We use donated robotics equipment and cooperate with schools and libraries in the New Orleans community, in hopes of creating an accessible and equitable STEM experience. As the Outreach Coordinator, my position was centered around creating crucial community connections and finding out how our program can best serve New Orleans students, teachers, and schools. I was given the freedom to explore many different mediums and take creative liberty with my mission, as well as bond with students and teachers alike. One of my main goals with this program was to access schools and their faculty, and discover the ways that we could make our program more accessible and more widely available. I attended teacher workshops, held meetings with school faculty, and communicated with members of the school board. After a full day of school-work, I would often travel to downtown New Orleans to meet with groups of past, present, and future teachers.

Through interviews and surveys I was able to gauge levels of community need and find out different ways to implement those requests into our programming. Our program is community focused and outward facing, and we are constantly looking for ways to increase STEM interest and make a career in STEM more available to disadvantaged students. Working with the STEM Learning Lab downtown has allowed me to connect with educators and further my community engagement. Founded in 2016, the STEM Learning Lab is a racial equity organization that provides teachers with equipment to create an engaging and rigorous classroom environment. They have worked with over 21,000 students and more than 320 teachers. By partnering with them, I was able to connect with countless schools in New Orleans and gain a stronger understanding of the challenges these students face.

Beyond faculty interaction, I wanted to focus my mission back on the students. I was given the privilege of interacting with students in the Tulane Upward Bound program. This program serves New Orleans public high school students who come from low- income families and face added challenges with educational achievement. Mr. CJ Brumfield and Dr. Francis, the director and assistant director of the program, respectively, work incredibly hard every week to provide these students with educational, social, and cultural resources, and help each student to reach their goals for post-secondary entry and success. I was extremely lucky that I was able to work with and tutor these students and find out what this program has done for them. This program has had an incredible impact on student outcomes and has truly shaped their lives for the better. The knowledge these students have gained from their sessions with Upward Bound is far beyond the scope of any classroom. Through student interactions, surveys, and community trips, I was able to gain an immense appreciation for the effort these students put in, as well as understand just how difficult it is for minoritized and disadvantaged students to succeed in this system. However, progress that promises a better future is continually being made. More than 80 percent of the students in this program reported an increase in confidence as they have been exposed to more STEM materials. So many of these students have ambitions of graduating college and going on to challenging careers in fields such as medicine and law. Their dreams would have been nearly impossible to achieve without this program and others like it, and I am surrounded by the gratitude that these students feel. My goal as a changemaker is to make real and lasting change in the New Orleans community. By stepping outside of my regular, day-to-day life, and engaging with the city in a completely new and raw way, I was immersed into a world outside of my own. The struggles that these students face and the lives that they lead are far beyond anything I could have imagined, and the strength that I see in them is outstanding.

By committing myself to my community, doing the hard research, and finding ways to truly involve myself, I have found a way to connect. With every struggle I found, I saw an opportunity for betterment and challenged myself to be the one to help necessary changes come to fruition. The people I have met and the struggles I have overcome in this process have truly transformed me, and I can only hope that the work that I have done has affected as much change in the world around me, as it has within me.