Redwood SEED Scholars: Roots That Hold Each Other Up ~ 1341

Tim In the arboretum at the University of California, Davis, there is a grove of redwood trees, which — if you know anything about redwoods or anything about Davis — should not be there. Redwoods are coastal trees. They want fog. They want cool, damp air drifting in off the Pacific. Davis is in the Central Valley, where summer temperatures regularly crack 100 degrees, and fog is something that happens other places.

And yet, planted in the 1930s, tended for nearly a century, the redwood grove at UC Davis is thriving.

And this blows my mind. Redwoods are the tallest trees on Earth, and their roots are super shallow, just like a few feet deep. And the way a redwood stays standing is that its roots reach out underground and interlock with the roots of the trees around it. They literally hold each other up.

Amy So the Redwood SEED Scholars Program fits right in beautifully on our campus. I don’t know if you’ve been to their website, but they have this really cool piece about redwoods, and why the name of Redwood has come into the name of their program.

There’s a grove in the arboretum that shouldn’t be there. We’re in a valley, and redwoods should not be growing there. And so there’s this really beautiful piece — I would encourage people to go to the website to look at what it says about those redwood trees, because it beautifully explains this program in a way that I think, like, everybody can resonate with.

Tim That’s Amy Roark. She runs the ticket office at the Mondavi Center, the performing arts venue at UC Davis. We’ll come back to her. The program she’s talking about is the Redwood SEED Scholars Program — S-E-E-D, as in Supported Education to Elevate Diversity. It’s a four-year residential college program for students in California with intellectual disabilities.

It’s the first of its kind in California and the first at any University of California campus. Scholars live in the dorms. They take UC Davis classes. They work jobs on campus and in town. And when they graduate, a remarkable number of them do something that for adults with intellectual disabilities in this country is still extremely rare.

They stay. They sign leases. They ride their bikes to work. In this episode of Think Inclusive, how a grove like that gets planted. It’s a story that starts with a mother, a son, and a blister. I’m Tim Villegas, and you’re listening to Think Inclusive, MCIE’s podcast about building schools — and, it turns out, whole towns — where every learner belongs. This is episode two of our four-part series in collaboration with Think College.

I am so glad you’re here. After a quick break, Beth Foraker and the big idea that took a global pandemic to say yes to.

Today’s episode is brought to you by Think College, the leading national center dedicated to expanding real college options for students with intellectual disability. Think College offers resources, training, and hands-on technical assistance for families, educators, and programs across the country. They also manage the only national directory of college programs for students with intellectual disability, making it easier than ever to explore what’s possible.

With a commitment to equity and evidence-based practice, Think College is helping campuses evolve, shaping policy, and elevating student voices. Learn more at thinkcollege.net. Again, that’s thinkcollege.net.

Beth Foraker is the director and co-founder of the Redwood SEED Scholars Program. She is not a professor. She’ll tell you that herself. For years, she worked in the UC Davis School of Education, supporting new teachers on their way into classrooms.

And for just about as long, she was asking anyone who would listen the same question: Why doesn’t a university like this one have an inclusive college program?

Beth Well, I worked in the School of Education for many years, starting in 2006. And I was in the credential master’s program helping teachers become teachers, and always wanted an inclusive college program for future teachers, and nurses, and doctors, and PTs, and OTs, and everybody.

And would ask different professors — I’m not a professor, so I’d ask different professors if that was interesting to them or in their area of research. Nobody was really very interested in that effort. It’s difficult because an inclusive college program is not a degree-seeking program, so students don’t get a Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Science.

So many people in academia are like, “You know what? Why, why would they do that?”

Tim So what changed? Honestly, everything, all at once.

Beth It really took the collapse of higher education from COVID.

It took a global pandemic. It took the massive racial reckoning of 2020 to kind of get all these disparate groups together to think about marginalized communities in such a way that we would apply for money to go for building an inclusive college program. We got the money in fall of 2020, October 2020.

Tim The money — $2.1 million from the U.S. Department of Education, a federal TPSID grant, the same program that now supports Terps EXCEED at the University of Maryland, from our last episode. It landed at UC Davis in October of 2020. No vaccine yet, campus half empty, and the university said yes to almost everything: dorm rooms, classes, all of it.

The grant arrived in October 2020. The first scholars arrived in August 2021.

What a timeline.

Beth So we got the money in October 2020, had to welcome students by August of 2021.

Tim So you had a year then to kind of—

Beth About, yeah, nine months to plan. Like birthing a baby.

Tim About—

Beth Nine months. It really was. Yeah.

Tim It was—

Beth About nine months.

Tim Oh my gosh.

She would know. Beth has four kids, and it’s her third, her son Patrick, who is the reason any of this exists. Patrick is 26 now. He has Down syndrome, and he grew up in Davis, fully included in his neighborhood schools from preschool all the way up through 12th grade, where he earned a California high school diploma.

And then in 2018, he ran out of road.

Beth So here is this Davis kid, you know, he goes to all the Davis football games, he’s part of the larger Davis community, but there was no inclusive college opportunity for him. There was no four-year program for him in 2018 in our state. And so we started looking at two-year programs that were available in our state.

But those two-year programs weren’t really a good fit for him, so we started looking at four-year programs across the country and — he ended up applying to three different programs and got an interview at two of those programs, and then got admitted to George Mason University, which was one of the very first four-year inclusive college programs.

Tim George Mason University in Virginia, 2,800 miles from Davis. Beth’s husband, John, was — let’s say — not immediately sold on sending their son with Down syndrome across the entire country. So Beth asked him to just come to the orientation. Just to see it.

Beth So I said, “Well, you know, I think you should come to the orientation and see what the opportunity is. If it doesn’t feel good, we’ll defer. But I really want you to see what’s available to Patrick.” And so he went to the orientation and he saw mentors talking, students in the program talking, families talking, professors talking, the directors and the team running the program talking, and he couldn’t believe the opportunity.

You know, he was blown away and he just started crying in the back of the classroom and he said, “I can’t believe California doesn’t have this opportunity. Why don’t California kids have this?” And I said, “I don’t know. I don’t know. But they accepted him. Like, I think we gotta let him try.”

Tim So they let him try. They drove him out, moved him in, flew home, and held their breath. Five days later, a Friday night, they called him on FaceTime.

Beth We still weren’t sure he could do it. And I don’t think you’re ever sure for any child you have. And so we just said, “We’re gonna just try this out.” What we told Patrick was, “We’re gonna try, and we’ll support you. You’re gonna try ’cause you think you wanna do it, and we’ll just see how it goes.

And if it doesn’t go well, no problem, you can come back home. That happens for a lot of kids.” And so we got out there and we got him set up and we left and we took a deep breath. And then five days after we got home, we called him up. It was a Friday night, and he answered the phone on FaceTime and he had his foot up on his desk.

He goes, “Mom, look at my foot.” And he had a big blister on his foot, and there were four people in the program surrounding him. And they were problem-solving this blister. And there were three guys and one young woman, and the one young woman — I was like, “We have a first aid kit, and you can get the Band-Aid, and I’ll tell you where it’s at.”

And she found the first aid kit, and they all were problem-solving this blister. And I just remember thinking, “That’s what it’s all about.” You know, my older two kids, when I called them five days into their thing, they didn’t have that giant community ready to go, right? But because he had gone into this cohort model program, he had this ready-made community, and it was really beautiful to see.

And I remember thinking, “I think he’s gonna be okay.”

Tim A blister. That’s the whole story, and I think it’s also just the whole idea, right? Not that college fixed Patrick’s foot, but that four people were gathered around a dorm desk on a Friday night, problem-solving the blister with him. A ready-made community five days in.

Beth watched that on a phone screen from the other side of the country, and here’s what else she knew sitting with that. In California, only about fifteen percent of adults with intellectual disabilities have paid work. Only twelve percent live independently. Patrick got his community, but his family had to send him to Virginia to find it.

Patrick graduated from George Mason and moved back to California, and by then, his mother had helped build the thing that hadn’t existed for him — at the university in his own hometown. Why did it work in Davis? Beth’s answer starts about sixty years before the program did.

Beth Because Davis — well, Davis Joint Unified has been an inclusive school district since the 1960s.

So, you know, preschool through 12th grade, very, very inclusive school district. So Davis is a super inclusive little college town. I mean, it’s flat. We’re in the Central Valley right outside of Sacramento, California. So the campus is only biking or pedestrian — it’s shut out of cars.

So it’s a biking campus, it’s a pedestrian campus, and so that biking mentality is all— The campus literally comes straight up to the downtown, so that biking goes straight into the city of Davis, too. So, you know, we were the first city to ever have bike lanes in the United States. So it’s a very bike-forward city and community.

Tim The first city in America to paint a bike lane — that is not civic legend. That’s just true. The campus is closed to cars. The buses are run by undergraduates. If you sat down and designed a town from scratch for young adults learning to get around their town, it would look a lot like Davis. Beth has a name for what a town like that makes possible.

Beth Well, what my dream is for every city is what I call a continuum of inclusion. Okay? So preschool through four years of college, full inclusion for people with intellectual disabilities so that you can launch into workplaces and independent living and full belonging to your larger community.

And Davis is the first continuum of inclusion in California.

Tim Preschool through four years of college, fully included, in one community. Davis is the first place in California where that sentence is true. So what does it feel like to be a scholar in the middle of that continuum? Meet Audrey Schlossberg. She’s a senior. And her path to college starts the way a lot of ours do — with an older sibling.

Audrey So I basically want to, like, go to college just like my sister Raina, because my big sister Raina is a big role model for me.

And I was saying to my sister, I say, “Hey, my sister Raina went to college. Well, what about me? I wanna go to college too, just like my big sister Raina.” So basically that’s how I got here.

Tim Audrey grew up in San Carlos in the Bay Area. She tried community college first and then came to Davis as a Redwood SEED Scholar. Scholars spend their first fall in foundational courses built for their cohort — so that’s literacy, budgeting, tech, civics — and by the winter quarter, they’re in regular UC Davis classes.

First one together, and then after that, whatever they choose, from 27 different departments so far.

Audrey chose women’s studies. But ask her about her first days on campus, and she’ll tell you she barely knew anyone.

Audrey When I went to, like, UC Davis, I barely even know everybody. So I was very shy at first, and then other people came along and started to, like, introduce their names and say, “Hey, my name is so-and-so.”

And then I gradually talked to them from there. And this program changed my life. And I love this program, and I love the Redwood SEED Scholars Program so much.

Tim Now, belonging at Redwood SEED is not left to chance. It is organized. There is, of course, a spreadsheet.

Audrey So basically, in our program, we have a weekend activities spreadsheet, and we put, like, our names on the spreadsheet to know which activity we want to join.

So basically, like, some Sundays we go to Target together, and we take a bus together to know and learn how the path to Target is. So that’s basically a very cool experience for me, to take a bus. And also we’ve been, like, going to a lot of different sports events together, and that is a lot of fun.

Tim Two years in the dorms with every other freshman and sophomore. Then two years in apartments, practicing groceries, meal planning, laundry, life — so that by graduation, independent living isn’t a leap. It’s a step. That’s the living half of the Davis story. The other half is work, and that half has a ladder in it.

That’s after the break.

This episode is brought to you by Think Higher, Think College, a national public awareness campaign changing expectations for what’s possible after high school for students with intellectual disability. This campaign asks a simple but powerful question: What if every young adult with intellectual disability saw college as an option?

Think Higher, Think College shares resources for families, educators, and higher ed leaders, highlights the real benefits of inclusive college programs, and offers tools to help spread the message that college is possible. With more than three hundred programs across forty-nine states and thousands of students already enrolled, the movement is growing.

Learn more and get involved at thinkhighered.net. Again, that’s thinkhighered.net.

Every Redwood SEED Scholar starts an on-campus internship in the spring of their first year, then a paid job, then more hours, harder tasks, and sometimes a second job. The program calls this the ladder of opportunity, and more than 30 campus employers are holding it steady.

The athletics department, the veterinary hospital, the campus radio station, the police department, the calf barn. This is an agricultural school. There is a calf barn. And then there’s the Mondavi Center, the performing arts hall where Amy Roark, who you heard at the top of the show, runs the ticket office.

About 100 students work at the Mondavi Center. Four years ago, Audrey became one of them — the first person with an intellectual disability the ticket office had ever hired.

Audrey So after I graduate from the program, I’m gonna be staying up in Davis, and I’m gonna be, like, living in an apartment with my other friends who are in the same program as me. And then I want to still work at the Mondavi Center.

And also I’m gonna be, like, working at UC Davis Health to become a doula. And also I want to become a health awareness mentor for the Scholars Program.

Tim An apartment in Davis with her friends, her same job at the Mondavi Center, training as a doula at UC Davis Health, and a mentoring role in the program that got her there. That’s one senior’s plan, and it rhymes with what the class ahead of her already did. Because across campus, in a giant operation most students never think about — the mail, the freight, and the deliveries — someone has been quietly turning student jobs into careers.

Jen Carmichael is the Director of Logistics at UC Davis.

Jen The jobs at logistics are very— The ability to have a position here, just the nature of our work opens a door for students that are in the Redwood SEED Scholars Program. And the reason I say that is because the job isn’t necessarily the same every day, and it’s not that it lacks complexity, but it can be kind of static, where we’re transactional, we have repetition, and that helps students, especially folks that have not had a job before, get their foot in the door. And there’s some level of comfort — the repetition of stuffing an envelope or sorting mail, things of that nature.

It makes it— It gives it that nice smooth entryway.

Tim Jen heard Beth pitch the program to her leadership team, saw the fit, and decided to give it a go. Ask her how that turned out, and she doesn’t reach for data. She reaches for Cristina.

Any kind of success stories that you can think of?

Jen Oh gosh, yes. I could give you a lot of them, but one right at the top of my thought process is Cristina. I remember the first day she got here, and we took a picture of that day. Not a lot of eye contact. You know, her physical fitness — we’re very labor intensive. We move around a lot, so it’s not just all sitting, but at first she was sitting a ton.

And she worked with us for more than two years as she was part of the program, and she’s one of the folks that we hired into a career spot, and she rides her bike here every single day from her apartment. And she has her own work tasks assigned just to her. She’s confident. She speaks up. She is participating in all aspects of logistics.

She asks to learn new things. And so just that difference from day one, when we first took a picture of our brand new scholars and she was shy and didn’t wanna really— She wasn’t even making eye contact with the camera. To the woman she is today, who is just ultra confident. She’s got a great sense of style, and she comes in, contributes, and it is night and day.

And so, I know that’s not all contributed to her work life, right? Because it’s a very well-rounded program, but I like to think that a chunk of it is, and it’s amazing to watch that evolution that has happened in such a short time for her.

Tim Cristina graduated in the program’s first class. Today, she is a UC Davis employee, a career hire, and she rides her bike to work every morning from an apartment she shares with three other graduates of the program. Friends who became roommates. Roots interlocking.

And here’s the part of the hiring story that shouldn’t get lost. It happened during a UC-wide hiring freeze.

Beth When they were graduating, a lot of those people in those different positions were like, “I’m graduating and I want a job, and UC Davis isn’t hiring.” The temporary employment pathway that UC Davis created — and so now four scholars were hired through that pathway.

Tim Four graduates hired onto staff in a hiring freeze, because people like Jen built a pathway anyway. Another graduate landed in an education research lab, and two more were hired by the program itself, as mentors. Which is a very good moment to talk about the mentors.

Beth I think what’s very special about our program is our mentors. We have over 170 undergrads, grad students, PhD students, and even two med school students who are mentors. And the mentors are a paid position now. So we’ve been slowly building this program. We’re just in our fifth year. We just graduated our first group last year.

So every year it slightly grows and changes. But these mentors have a genuine curiosity and an understanding of the opportunity for themselves and for the scholars, and they are just dedicated to having them be successful. And they’re such fantastic problem solvers. So they’re so deeply compassionate, so equity-minded.

It’s just so cool to watch them advocate, support, and really encourage these scholars in our program. So I think it’s them, truthfully, and they are the reason I think the scholars are successful.

Tim A hundred and seventy mentors — undergrads, grad students, PhD students, even a couple of med students — in paid, specialized roles: academic, residential, health and wellness, social inclusion, employment.

Four or five mentors around each scholar. The program calls it a circle of support. It’s a different design than Maryland’s for-credit mentor class from last episode. Same engine, different fuel. And it keeps evolving, usually because somebody just offers.

Beth When we had our very first group, when they became sophomores, we were like, “Oh dang, they’re gonna be going into the apartments.

They have to start practice cooking. What does that look like?” Well, I had a med school student who was taking a quarter off, and she was like, “Oh, I can do, like, cooking with sophomores. I’ll just do cooking with sophomores.” I’m like, “Okay.” So she built this whole little cooking with sophomores opportunity.

And so then the next year we’re like, “Okay, let’s do cooking with sophomores again.” Now we have way more mentors doing that and supporting that. And then now we have these graduates, and two of our graduates we hired as mentors. And so they are like, “Hey, we’re living in our apartment. Let’s take a couple sophomores and have them come to our apartment and do cooking with us.”

We’re like, “That’s so cool. Sure.”

Tim Graduates of the program hired as mentors, teaching sophomores to cook in the apartment where they live independently. The support system is starting to staff itself.

So does it work? The program has now graduated its first class, eight scholars. Here’s where they are.

Beth So we graduated eight scholars. Six of them still live in Davis. Now, these people are from all over California. So six chose to live in Davis, one is living in San Francisco, and then one returned home. So that is an 88% living independently statistic.

So of the six, four live together, one lives in a studio, one lives with other people. I had the chance to go visit that group of four just this past weekend, because I was looking at those apartments for my own son, where they’re living, and they gave a tour to my son and me. And just seeing them living their lives — it’s just awesome.

They all have paid work. Some of them have two paid jobs. They have the confidence to live independently. They’re still getting support, of course, but it’s minimal support. They have no support at work. No job coaches are at work with them. They’re just working independently. And that is a huge success.

Tim I hope you caught that. Beth was touring these apartments for her own son. Patrick, the young man whose blister started this whole thing, may end up living in the same complex as the first graduates of the program his mom built because of him.

That is not just a full-circle moment. That is a spiral going up. Eighty-eight percent of that first class living independently, in a state where the overall number for adults with intellectual disabilities is 12.

Beth thinks that she knows exactly which ingredients did that, and she thinks the whole country should hear this next part.

Beth Well, I think there should be a national conversation about two-year versus four-year programs. So there’s 360 inclusive college programs, but 90% are two years. Also, 90% offer no inclusive living. So there’s really only 10% of all these programs that have four-year programs with inclusive living.

And when you have the four-year inclusive living, I mean, imagine your outcomes. They’re just gonna be significantly better, because you have double the time and you have — really, the independent living piece is huge. So much learning is happening in that independent living.

I’m happy for every single opportunity we have in our state and nation. But if we’re gonna— I mean, we’ve got 6,000 colleges and universities in our country. If we’re gonna be building programs, let’s build four-year programs with inclusive living.

Tim And California is listening, by the way. In 2024, the state wrote this idea into its budget, creating the California Center for Inclusive College, a statewide center to help campuses build programs like this one, with the UC Davis MIND Institute written right into the law.

Other universities are already working with Redwood SEED to replicate it. One grove seeding a forest. Because look, redwoods still shouldn’t grow in Davis. It’s too hot. It’s too dry. Everybody knows that. But they grow anyway, because somebody decided a century ago that they should, because people have never stopped tending them, and because underneath, where you can’t see it, the roots are holding onto each other.

Ask Audrey what she’d tell a family wondering whether there’s a place like this for them.

Audrey The Redwood SEED Scholars Program is a very amazing program, and I hope everybody can come to Davis and be in this program.

Tim Thanks for listening to episode two of our Think College podcast series. This podcast is a production of the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education in partnership with Think College at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

If you’d like to learn more about the Redwood SEED Scholars Program, visit redwoodseed.ucdavis.edu. And if you want to explore inclusive college programs across the country, including the only national directory of them, visit thinkcollege.net. Next time, we head to the ATL, where the IDEAL program at Georgia State University is rewriting what a college degree pathway can look like in the heart of a city.

I’m Tim Villegas. Thanks for listening.