Giving Compass' Take:

• Summer Search is service program that identifies high school leaders and invites them to work on a sustainability project abroad that involves the local community.

• There are various models for providing service abroad, but this one focuses on building mutual respect with people from other countries. Should other organizations emulate this model? 

• Read about how other organizations are making an impact using a different approach to service trips abroad.

The concept of taking teenagers far from the familiar so they can discover their resilience and their leadership skills is a crucial aspect of Summer Search, a national nonprofit organization that makes college more achievable for low-income students — almost all of them the first in their families to go — through travel and extensive mentorship.

Summer Search partners with high schools, community-based organizations and families, recruiting rising sophomores from the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Boston, Morales Soto’s hometown.

“One of the things we look for is their ability to lead, their ability to reflect, demonstrate altruism,” said Hermese Velasquez, Summer Search Boston’s executive director.

Velasquez, a former Summer Searcher herself, firmly supports the program’s unique experiential component that sends students on a wilderness trip before their junior year then abroad to a country that matches with their interests before senior year. Instead of visiting her home country of Belize more than 15 years ago, Velasquez traveled to Ghana, where she volunteered as a math teacher and learned, she said, from talented, effective local educators.

The value of building relationships based on mutual respect with people from foreign countries, many of them impoverished, has taken on added meaning for the Summer Searchers.

Some 91 percent of Summer Search students are first-generation college-goers, 96 percent are students of color and the same percentage qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch. The program says 69 percent of its participants earn four-year college degrees within six years — three and half times higher than the national average for low-income, minority students attending traditional public schools.

Read about Summer Search by Kei-Sygh Thomas at The 74.