Q& A with First Career Community Client Majas Petras

| Beacon News, Community Outreach
Maja First Career Community

For a first-time teacher, teaching kids barely out of Pampers can be a lot like herding cats — only with fewer hairballs. Maja Petras found herself in the role of cat-herder, er, primary school teacher earlier this month. Petras, made a pre-kindergarten class at the Villages Elementary School her proving ground for auditioning her solo […]

Pioneering Beacon College Program Helps Grads Beat Failure to Launch

| Beacon News, Community Outreach, Featured
First Career Community Students

College graduation is at once an exciting time of accomplishment and a nervy realization that it’s time to navigate the world independently as an adult. Not that everyone is ready to launch. Some 20 percent of college graduates with learning differences and attention issues stumble immediately after graduation in making successful transitions to full independence and to rewarding careers. This reality undergirds Beacon College’s pioneering pilot program, the First Career Community.

Beacon College Communications Director Elected to Community Health Centers’ Board

| Beacon News, Community Outreach
Darryl Owens

Darryl E. Owens, who serves as director of communications at Beacon College, has been elected to the board of directors of Community Health Centers. CHC directors appointed Owens to the board at their April 26 meeting. Launched in 1972, Community Health Centers is a private, non-profit organization that provides compassionate healthcare services to more than 66,000 under-served children and adults each year local communities that are insured, uninsured, and under-insured.

Anchovies for Attendance

| Community Outreach
Rimes Early Learning Center

Beacon College representatives Sheryl Nichols and Darryl E. Owens and human services student Lilly Slomowitz visited Rimes Early Learning & Literacy Center Thursday as part of the college’s effort to support strengthening attendance numbers at the Lake County Schools venue. Students who missed fewer than three days this month were treated to an after-school pizza […]

Beacon College Crew Ladles Up ‘Souper’ Volunteerism at Lake County Fundraiser

| Beacon News, Community Outreach, Top Story
Simon Vaz

Every day, one in six Central Floridians wonders whether food will grace his or her dining table that day. In Lake County, some 45,120 Lake County residents wonder just how they’ll curb their too often rumbling bellies. That troubled Simon Vaz. He knew he couldn’t solve the dilemma alone. Yet, by dishing up hearty helpings of chicken noodle soup, Vaz reckoned he could help bring awareness to the hunger that ails too many neighbors of Beacon College in Leesburg, Fla.