Jodi got the chance to speak with Christian Esteban, the current Executive Director of the JOYA Scholars program.

The program's mission is to inspire and prepare students from families of low-income communities in Fullerton to succeed through higher education. When JOYA Scholars began in 2009, not a single high school student from the Garnet neighborhood in Fullerton, CA - aside from Valeria Sosa who became Garnet’s first college graduate in 2014 - was eligible for a four-year university. Today, there are students enrolled at the University of California Irvine, University of California Riverside, and California State University Fullerton. Even more students from the program attend local colleges planning to transfer to four-year universities.