For American students of color, college enrollment is approximately 25%; yet only 9% of those students choose to leave the U.S. despite an abundance of academic, service, and professional opportunities abroad. The National Center for Global Engagement (NCGE) has been created to provide these opportunities for high potential students of color across the nation.

NCGE was created after a year’s worth of collaborative work between Marquis Brown, Founder of the BrownBell Foundation, Anthony Jewett, Founder of the Bardoli Global Foundation, and the Monitor Group of Cambridge, MA. A year ago Brown and Jewett represented separate organizations focused on diversifying study abroad. Their work together, however, revealed how complimentary their respective programs were to one another. The two developed a vision of a larger, combined organization that would house their programs under one roof—the National Center for Global Engagement.

“Our merger represents a logical connection between two philosophically and programmatically aligned organizations. My K-12 work with Bardoli Global and Marquis’ Higher Education work with BrownBell create a linear path to increasing global exposure for students of color from kindergarten to college,” said Jewett, Managing Director of NCGE’s K-12 Education Group.

The K-12 Group will work with high potential students of color in urban public schools while the Higher Education Group will work with high potential college students at Historically Black, Hispanic, and Tribal Institutions. “We’re starting with student groups whom we believe are most likely to benefit in the near term. Over the coming years we will build from those groups to serve a larger, broader audience,” said Marquis Brown, Managing Director of NCGE’s Higher Education Group. For the 2009-2010 academic year NCGE will serve 114 students at high schools and colleges in Atlanta, GA, Charlotte, N.C., and Houston, TX.