“Our students are amazing. These are the students who are going to transform our communities—our corporate communities, our academic communities,” said Dan Navisky, Boston executive director of Thrive Scholars. Founded in Los Angeles over twenty years ago, Thrive Scholars supports high-achieving students of color from economically disadvantaged backgrounds in six regions to get into top-tier colleges, and to succeed once they get there.
Thrive works with students for six years, from junior year in high school through four years of college, and helps them transition into a first job or graduate program. In the five and a half years of Navisky’s tenure, the Massachusetts cohort of students has doubled to nearly 200, and his goal is to increase that to 300 over the next few years. “This year we admitted our largest cohort of high school juniors in our history. I’m really proud of that,” he said.
Alerted to the job opening at Thrive by BC Law classmate Alison Eggers ’07, a Thrive Boston board member, Navisky saw a golden opportunity to “contribute to the community in a way that leveraged the skills that I developed as a lawyer and in practice, but also transcended the traditional practice of law.” As executive director, he draws on experience from his pre-law career in government, civil rights, and public policy, his training at BC Law, extensive volunteer work on nonprofit boards, and his post-law-school practice in business litigation.
“We have a robust proven model that really makes an impact, and the data show it,” said Navisky. Forty percent of Thrive Scholars attend one of the nation’s dozen most selective schools and ninety percent enroll at one of the top fifty. “We know what we do is successful, so our goal is to serve more students.” That goal “drives all of us at Thrive every day,” he said.
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