In 2011, UC Davis created the Guardian Teachers Program (GTP) to provide young adults with lived experience in foster care the opportunity to enter the UC Davis School of Education and earn a Teacher Credential/Master degree. The mission of the program was to train teachers to work productively in the public schools, a goal that would benefit the many foster children in California’s K-12 system.
This new program originated with Davis Campbell, the Chair of the Dean’s Board of Advisors for the UC Davis School of Education who was a staunch advocate. The project was funded by the Stuart Foundation, a nonprofit committed to the education and well-being of children, where Mr. Campbell also served on the Board of Trustees.
The GTP was successful but early evaluation research determined that many young adults with a background in foster care had career goals other than becoming a K-12 teacher. In 2013, Mr. Campbell convinced the Stuart Foundation to expand the GTP into the Guardian Professions Program (GPP), a pilot project that would provide assistance to students who wanted to apply for ANY advanced degree whether it be a Master, PhD or professional program. GPP resources were offered to all young adults throughout California with lived experience in foster care. Sylvia Sensiper, PhD, was hired to develop and direct the new project.
From 2013-2017, the GPP worked with students in undergraduate support programs and also alumni who wanted to return to graduate school. With this help, over eighty applicants successfully gained admission to advanced degree programs including medicine, academia, dentistry, higher education, counseling, law, social work and public policy, among others. GPP associated students gained admission to graduate school programs at CSUs and UCs across California, as well as at private schools such as USC and Stanford, and out-of-state campuses including the University of Michigan, Midwestern University Dental School, Boston University and Harvard University.
After Sensiper left the program in 2017, the GPP focused on becoming a support program for former foster youth attending graduate school only at the Davis campus. Support includes community activities, advising and scholarship funding, as well as application support for those students interested in applying to UC Davis graduate programs.
MAPS (Mentoring for Advanced and Professional Success) emerged in 2020, when a group of young professionals who had benefited from the GPP began to collaborate on a new project to revive the state-wide outreach of the original pilot.
