If you come out to the Union South Varsity Hall tonight for the University of Wisconsin Odyssey Project’s graduation ceremony, you will hear some amazing life stories. Be prepared to laugh, and probably cry.
“My favorite quote from a student is: ‘The Odyssey Project helped me unwrap my gifts and rewrite the story of my life,'” says UW Odyssey Project Director Emily Auerbach. “What I like the most about Odyssey is when students find gifts that he or she didn’t even know they had and when they take their lives – and the lives of their children – in a different direction that they even thought possible. That’s the most rewarding thing of all.”
For 13 years now, UW-Odyssey Project has been offering a two-semester humanities class for adults facing barriers to a college education. They provide them with free tuition, textbooks, childcare, a weekly dinner, and six UW credits in English through support from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, grants, and private donations.
“When we first started I never imagined the Odyssey Project would be what it is today,” Auerbach tells Madison365. “It really has expanded and I’m so excited about the way we’ve been able to keep the alumni going and to bring in more enrichment with the children and the grandchildren [of students].”
The inspirational project changes lives for adults near the poverty level by empowering them to find their voices and getting them a jumpstart at earning college degrees they never thought possible. Graduates of the program have journeyed from homelessness to UW-Madison degrees, from incarceration to meaningful work in the community.
“We have some students from our early years who have literally gone from being homeless to having master’s degrees,” Auerbach says. “That’s the transformation that I’m most excited about. We have a student that is working full time as a graphic designer at UW who had been sketching in prison.
“We have a student in class who has spent more than half of his life in prison and now he’s now ministering to men behind bars,” she adds. “I have had a student who was a victim of abuse who is now a social worker. That’s what I like the best … to see that transformation.”
The Odyssey Project was inspired by the Clemente Course in the Humanities, a pioneer effort by social critic and author Earl Shorris in New York City, and Berea College in Kentucky, both of which are opportunities for people without financial resources to attend college. Shorris found that what separates the rich from the poor is the humanities.
“Lifelong friendships have been made between the students and also for me and the students,” Auerbach says. “In fact, one of my alumni from the first year is coming back to Madison – he’s been in South Carolina – and taking a job during this summer that will include helping us maintain our ties with our alumni. I hear from a lot of our alumni that they really miss the fellowship that they had in the class, so we want to have more events and activities that keep our students together.
“There have even been some [Odyssey students] who have dropped out in one year and come back in another,” Auerbach adds. “We had a student last year who had been in my very first year … she was arrested and in prison for 7 years and she came back last year and graduated from our program 11 years later.”
Each year, 30 students embark on a journey that culminates at the Odyssey Project graduation. They meet every Wednesday at the UW South Madison Partnership space with UW instructors where they write essays and poems and interact intensely with each other and their professors. Adult students read, write about, and engage in lively discussions of Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King, Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, Gandhi and more. Along the way, they become family. That family extends beyond the classroom and beyond the nine months that each student is in class. And that family, over the years, has gotten huge.
“We’ve had over 350 students walk through our doors,” Auerbach says.
This year, Odyssey has Iraqi students, a Hmong student, a white student and many African-American students. “It’s a very, very diverse group this year ranging from age 18 to 60,” Auerbach says.
Odyssey students report transformative outcomes from their participation in the program. They also report that they read more to their children, feel that they are better parents, have more hope about their own future, are more likely to vote and become involved in their communities, and have made plans to continue their educations and/or seek job training.
Odyssey Junior is a related program for younger family members who meet on Wednesday nights through the end of April and culminate in a printed volume and a performance.
“We started that pilot last spring when we moved over the partnership space because that opened up space at the library,” Auerbach says. “We started with 14 teenagers. This year was our very first year – September to May – of doing a parallel Odyssey Junior program. They did a lot of work on writing and reading and speaking.
“The goal was to have whole families going home excited about learning,” she adds. “Some of the kids called it ‘going to college.’ We had a four-year-old who said he was ‘going to college like mom.’ We tried to give out things with UW on it to early on encourage them to think way ahead to their future.”
The Odyssey Graduation Ceremony is where it all comes together – current students, past graduates, supporters and staff gather for the annual event that is open to the public.
“We usually have 300 or 400 people at the event,” Auerbach says. “Anybody can come. We invited all of our donors and various people from the community who have helped us, but it’s definitely free and open to the public. And it’s not like most graduations that can be very boring because each student talks for a little bit and shares something they wrote.”
Students and former students provide entertainment that keeps the evening lively and inspiring. They give speeches that are sometimes funny, sometimes emotional, sometimes heart wrenching. They talk about their struggles and their triumphs.
“We never know what’s going to happen at graduation. One year we had a drunk uncle who kept shouting out,” laughs Auerbach. “There will be a lot of energy in the room, but I won’t guarantee order.”
Last November, Auerbach accepted the Distinguished Service Award from the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities in Orlando. This award honors “significant contributions to increasing diversity and access in the public higher education community.” Her program that is now 13 years old is making a difference and she hopes that people come out to the graduation to witness the transformative power of the Odyssey Project.
“I think the graduation will give people hope,” she says. “There’s just so much despair in Madison right now about Madison’s poor record when it comes to equity that I think that if you have a program like ours that has succeeded in breaking the cycle of generational poverty and that is giving people a jumpstart or a restart on college degrees that they never thought were possible, it gives you a sense of possibility and hope.
“It’s also just a great time to share in the joy that different families are feeling and to make them feel supported by the community as a whole,” she adds.
Come see the graduation of the class of 2015-16 tonight at Union South’s Varsity Hall. The ceremony begins at 6:30 p.m., with a reception following at 8 p.m.
If you or anyone you know might be interested in the Odyssey Project, visit www.odyssey.wisc.edu or call 262-3733. Donations can be sent to Odyssey Project, 21 N. Park St. Room 7223, Madison, WI 53715.
