USD’S TORERO URBAN SCHOLARS PROGRAM FILLS AN URGENT NEED

Despite making up less than 5 percent of the global population, the United States is home to nearly 25 percent of incarcerated persons worldwide — disproportionately impacting Black, Brown and Indigenous communities nationwide. This may seem like common knowledge to those of us who work in and adjacent to the justice system, but is perhaps still shocking to the average reader. Historically, individuals who have been formerly incarcerated lack access to many basic and fundamental human rights — educational equity being one of them. In response, the University of San Diego’s Torero Urban Scholars was created to work toward closing that gap.

We founded the program in 2022, after having the idea for it in 2018, while doing

Brown-peters is the assistant director of admissions at California Western School of Law and lives in Kearny Mesa. Galy is the director of neighborhood and community engaged partnerships at USD’S Mulvaney Center and lives in Mission Valley. They are co-founders of the Torero Urban Scholars program at USD. research on support services for formerly incarcerated students along with a few other graduate USD students. All of the student researchers, including us, identify as formerly incarcerated or system-impacted. For those who may not be as familiar with the term, “system-impacted,” it’s widely used to describe any individual “who has been incarcerated, those with arrests/convictions but no incarceration and those who have been directly impacted by a loved one being incarcerated.” We understood, firsthand, the numerous challenges that others like them faced when navigating a university setting.

Torero Urban Scholars set out to create a program that ensured better access, advocacy and support for the other USD students like them dealing with similar circumstances. Through our research we discovered that nearly every college and university in San Diego had existing programs directly supporting system-impacted students. At that time, however, USD was not among them. Thus, the idea for the program was modeled after similar programs with longstanding track records of success such as California State Univer