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WORK TITLE: Grit and Hope
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1945
WEBSITE: https://www.barbaradavenport.com/
CITY: San Diego
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1945; children: two daughters.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Bennington College and Simmons College School of Social Work; Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, certificate in child psychotherapy.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Psychotherapist and author.
WRITINGS
Contributor to professional journals and other periodicals, including Christian Science Monitor, CityBeat, Reader, San Diego Union Tribune, and Stanford Magazine.
SIDELIGHTS
Barbara Davenport has “worked for more than two decades” as a psychotherapist and has published two books on the problems faced by children and their families in modern-day America, according to a biographical blurb found at her eponymous website. In The Worst Loss: How Families Heal from the Death of a Child, which she wrote under the pseudonym Barbara Rosof, she examines the effect that the processes of grief and mourning have on families. “She explains the psychological tasks that parents and siblings face in coming to terms with their loss,” explained the Barbara Davenport Website contributor.
In her second book, Grit and Hope: A Year with Five Latino Students and the Program That Helped Them Aim for College, Davenport looks at the successes and failures of Reality Changers, a program funded by a former University of California student named Christopher Yanov. Yanov used the money he won on the game show Wheel of Fortune to create a program for Hispanic students, giving them an opportunity to be the first members of their families to attend college. “Davenport furnishes a journalistically taut picture that unsentimentally presents the program’s limitations as well as those of its founder,” said a Kirkus Reviews contributor. “In addition, she expertly describes the legal and political horizons within which the students reside.” “Told with deep affection and without sentimentality,” wrote a contributor to the website of the University of California Press, “the students stories show that … the support of a strong program makes a critical difference.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2017, review of Grit and Hope: A Year with Five Latino Students and the Program That Helped Them Aim for College.
ONLINE
Barbara Davenport Website, https://www.barbaradavenport.com (February 14, 2018), author profile.
University of California Press Website, https://www.ucpress.edu/ (February 14, 2018), review of Grit and Hope.
Barbara Davenport has written two books and is at work on a third. Grit and Hope (University of California Press) takes the reader inside Reality Changers, the country’s most effective college readiness program, where 94 percent of its graduates go on to college. Davenport followed Reality Changers over five years, with full access to the program, to founder Christopher Yanov, and to the courageous students whose stories are the heart of this book. Their stories offer an intimate look at the withering prejudice, family problems and academic challenges they must overcome to rise from America’s underclass. In interviews with students, parents, and program staff, she explores what drives students to achieve beyond their expectations, and also examines the costs of their dreams. Portraits of students give a human face to two of the most vexing questions facing the country: immigration and inequality.
The Worst Loss (Henry Holt and Co), written as Barbara Rosof explores parents’ and siblings’ experience when a child dies. It draws on families’ own stories and on groundbreaking research on grieving to examine why families must grieve and what helps them heal. She explains the psychological tasks that parents and siblings face in coming to terms with their loss and charts the course of both acute grief and the long haul of mourning, and she teaches bereaved parents how to help their surviving children.
She practiced psychotherapy for more than two decades, and she’s written for the San Diego Union Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, Stanford Magazine and San Diego alt-weeklies CityBeat and the Reader.
Barbara is a graduate of Bennington College and Simmons College School of Social Work, and holds a certificate in child psychotherapy from the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. She has two adult daughters and she lives in San Diego.
Davenport, Barbara: GRIT AND HOPE
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Davenport, Barbara GRIT AND HOPE Univ. of California (Indie Nonfiction) $65.00 6, 10 ISBN: 978-0-520-28444-9
A debut book examines a groundbreaking academic program that helps troubled teens find their ways to college. While a student at the University of California, San Diego, Christopher Yanov was disturbed by the way the allure of gang life extinguished the dreams of so many otherwise promising youths, and he pledged to do something about it. At the age of 22, he started Reality Changers, a nonprofit organization designed to mentor at-risk teens, helping them to enter college. The initiative started modestly, with a class of four eighth-graders and a shoestring budget, operating out of a Presbyterian church. Yanov won a substantial amount of money on the game show Wheel of Fortune, which he used to fund the program, and the number of participating students eventually swelled to more than 500 and magnetized national attention. Membership in the program is demanding: students must maintain a 3.0 GPA; forswear sex, drugs, alcohol, and gangs; enroll in an extracurricular activity; and perform community service. It's also uncompromising: in a heart-rending moment in author and psychotherapist Davenport's book, one student is forced to resign after he gets his girlfriend pregnant. The author shadowed five Hispanic students in the program for the expanse of a year, chronicling their challenges and triumphs. More than just a study group, the organization functions as a surrogate family for its students, many of whom come from embattled homes. Davenport furnishes a journalistically taut picture that unsentimentally presents the program's limitations as well as those of its founder. In addition, she expertly describes the legal and political horizons within which the students reside, particularly with respect to immigration. Two of the participants she followed were undocumented and lived in constant fear of deportation. One student was cautioned by his parents against visiting Dartmouth because he would have to show his ID while boarding a plane, a potentially disastrous situation. The author permits the story to expound itself, showing notable restraint from heavy-handed editorializing or cloying poeticizing. This is a rare achievement: an empirically rigorous history that engages some of the most contentious issues of the day without rancor or agenda. A remarkably sensitive and meticulous investigation of the hurdles to higher education many teens in the U.S. face--and sometimes clear.
Grit and Hope
A Year with Five Latino Students and the Program That Helped Them Aim for College
Barbara Davenport (Author)
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Paperback, 240 pages
ISBN: 9780520284456
June 2016
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Description
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Author Bio
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Grit and Hope tells the story of five inner-city Hispanic students who start their college applications in the midst of the country’s worst recession and of Reality Changers, the program that aims to help them become the first in their families to go college. This year they must keep up their grades in AP courses, write compelling essays for their applications, and find scholarships to fund their dreams. One lives in a garage and struggles to get enough to eat. Two are academic standouts, but are undocumented, ineligible for state and federal financial assistance. One tries to keep his balance as his mother gets a life-threatening diagnosis; another bonds with her sister when their parents are sidelined by substance abuse.
The book also follows Christopher Yanov, the program’s youthful, charismatic founder in a year that’s as critical for Reality Changers’ future as it is for the seniors. Yanov wants to grow Reality Changers into national visibility. He’s doubled the program’s size, and hired new employees, but he hasn’t anticipated that growing means he’ll have to surrender some control, and trust his new staff. It’s the story of a highly successful, yet flawed organization that must change in order to grow.
Told with deep affection and without sentimentality, the students stories show that although poverty and cultural deprivation seriously complicate youths’ efforts to launch into young adulthood, the support of a strong program makes a critical difference.