New Faces in Leadership
For the Campus. For the City. For the Future.

Act Six is a leadership and scholarship program that connects local faith-based community affiliates with faith- and social justice-based colleges to equip emerging urban and community leaders to engage the college campus and their communities at home through a simple but powerful four-part strategy:

1. Recruit and Select
   Locally recruit and select diverse, multicultural cadres of the Northwest's most promising urban and community student leaders.
2. Train and Prepare
   Intensively train these groups of students in the year prior to college, equipping them to support each other, succeed academically and grow as service-minded leaders and agents of transformation.
3. Send and Fund
   Send the teams together to select faith- and social justice-based colleges across Washington and Oregon on full-tuition, full-need scholarships.
4. Support and Inspire
   Provide strong campus support, ongoing leadership development and vocational connections to inspire scholars to serve their home communities.

The Need

Many communities across the Northwest enjoy wonderful cultural and economic diversity where people from different backgrounds, perspectives, and life experiences have regular opportunities to interact and communicate. Yet these communities also yearn for new generations of committed, visionary leaders who will build bridges across differences and respond creatively to the pressing challenges they confront.

Unfortunately, too few colleges working to prepare the next generation of leaders provide similarly diverse campus environments and too many potential campus and community leaders face significant obstacles on the journey to a college degree. People of color are still underrepresented in higher education and there remain significant disparities in college retention rates for students from different cultural and economic backgrounds. The Act Six initiative was created as a way to address this issue by educating, inspiring and equipping a new generation of visionary, committed community leaders.

The Vision

Act Six believes that emerging urban and community leaders, with the right opportunity, support and inspiration, can combine their natural gifts and passion with a college education to create a new kind of bold, visionary leadership that will transform our campuses, our communities and our collective future.

Marks of Success

Act Six has selected and trained 256 scholars from Tacoma, Seattle, Portland, Spokane and the Yakima Valley.  They represent six continents of the world, speak 32 native languages, and represent the very best emerging urban and community leadership that the region has to offer.   While over 85% of scholars come from low-income households or are the first in their family to go to college, they are defying the odds with retention and graduation rates of more than 90%.

On campus, Act Six scholars are making a profound impact as they demonstrate their leadership in a wide variety of contexts. Creating award winning programs in the residence halls, founding and leading clubs and even serving as student government president, scholars are making a difference on campus.  And the impact doesn't end at graduation. Act Six alumni are putting their passion and education to work back in their home communities and in other communities around the country and world.

Learn More

• Discover the powerful results of Act Six
• Meet the scholars and read about some of their successes
• Get to know the staff and affiliates that make Act Six work