Ambition isn’t just an after school program that Jada Augustine volunteers for, it is an idea that sums up her very being.
The senior speech pathology student at Cal State Long Beach is a first generation Belizean-American and first in her family to attend a four-year university. She is scheduled to graduate in the fall, but isn’t waiting for that to accomplish her goals.
In January, Augustine received 501(c)3 status for her organization Jada’s Got Your Backpack, making it a recognized non-profit. Jada’s Got Your Backpack collects donations to buy and collect backpacks that are shipped to Belize, where she then goes to pass them out to children.
“I started it because I went to Belize and I saw the need for kids to receive backpacks,” Augustine said. “A lot of kids had [tote] bags and I was like, ‘Why do they have to use that?’ They should be able to get a nice backpack to go to school and be confident.”
Augustine didn’t want to waste any time getting the program started. She said that while in Belize, she saw a older women with a barrel of backpacks, essentially doing doing what she wanted to do. Augustine’s aunt said that maybe it could be something to do when she graduated – but that didn’t sit well.
“Why do I have to wait until I graduate?” she said. “Why can’t I do it now? I think college is the best time to hustle, because you know a lot of people here and it’s a bigger vicinity.”
She will return to Belize in August. It will be her first giveaway event since Jada’s Got Your Backpack received non-profit status, allowing donors to receive a tax write-off for helping her organization.
“The first time I did it [in 2016] I didn’t have a team, it was just myself and I had 120 backpacks,” she said. “This year I’m going with a team, and I have 230 backpacks. It [basically] doubled in a year, so it’s really good.”
Right now she just uses word-of-mouth and social media to spread awareness for her work and gather donations, but the organization continues to grow. This is not the first time she overcame the odds.
When she first started at CSULB she was in the Educational Opportunity Program for first-generation students. The EOP 100 Orientation course just focuses on math and English, but four weeks of math was a worry that weighed on her. She was able to get into CSULB despite failing all her high school math classes.
“I was studying hard, hard, hard – like I never study that hard – and I still was failing, and that’s when I knew something was wrong,” Augustine said.
She discovered she had Dyscalculia, a brain condition that makes it hard to make sense of numbers and math concepts.
She was able to work her way into a speech pathology program.
“It’s really rigorous, it’s a really, really, hard program but I love most of my professors, Augustine said. “There’s no numbers. There’s headaches, but no numbers.”
Eventually, she would like to get a graduate’s degree and be the head of a special education department. Still, she’s not wasting any time getting experience in the field.
Augustine currently works as a special education aide in the Long Beach Unified School District and Huntington Beach Unified School District and is already getting ideas on how to improve the programs.
“Currently, there’s a lot of parents that are not educated on the services that are out there for them, so they feel hopeless or they feel tired,” she said.
She also has committed to be a mentor for Ambition, a program to inspire inner-city high school students, started by Nancy Gale.
“[Gale] wants to bring out this ambitious side to them,” Augustine said. “So she wants them to say, ‘Come on. You this nice car? You want this nice house? Work for it, you can get it. You don’t have to envy people… You can be that person.’”
It’s a message that Augustine tries to personify in her day to day life, all the while managing Jada’s Got Your Backpack.
“The non-profit doesn’t put any money in my pocket, but it satisfies me … Not a lot of people who are 21 can say they gave 120 backpacks to kids in a third world country and then this year 230, and that’s 350 in two years,” she said. “You always see, ‘Graduation starts today,’ but giving back starts everyday, anyday, so I think that’s really really important.”