Hope, campus rise together

Two years ago it came as the loveliest of surprises: a $12.5 million donation to the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology from the philanthropists

Bill and Joyce Cummings.

It was seed money for a much-needed move that would allow the struggling South End landmark to chart a new course — and, in the process, to move to Roxbury.

The chain of events that donation set in motion bore fruit Tuesday, as the college broke ground on its new campus in Nubian Square, set to open in fall of 2025.

This is a two-year school that trains nontraditional students in desperately needed technical careers. Founded through a 1789 bequest from Benjamin Franklin himself, it’s been a part of the educational landscape of Boston for decades.

But old Franklin probably wouldn’t recognize today’s student body, dominated by Black and brown students, immigrants and children of immigrants, half of them Boston residents.

The school serves approximately 1,000 students. Of those, 73 percent identity as people of color, 40 percent are first-generation college students, and nearly all of them — 98 percent, to be precise — receive some form of financial aid.

The school, rebranded “Franklin Cummings Tech” after the philanthropic windfall, has been the scene of a stunning turnaround. Just three years ago, it was struggling for survival, with a tiny endowment, declining enrollment, and a South End campus it desperately needed to unload for operating cash.

Things were so bad that a merger with Wentworth Institute of Technology, a deal that would have pretty much killed Franklin as anyone has known it, was nearly approved by the school’s board of directors.

That’s where Dr. Aisha Francis enters the picture.

Named president of the Franklin Institute in 2021, Francis has been a cheerful and indomitable presence who simply wouldn’t allow the place to collapse. It was her determination that the school needed to move closer to its true community, which the South End no longer represented.

“When we were thinking about a place to position the institution we wanted to be closer to our students, we wanted to be close to public transit, we wanted to be in an area that was already vibrant,” Francis said Tuesday.

“Where we’re located currently, we blend in, we recede into the background. People don’t realize that we’re there. Here, it’s a complete opposite impact. It’s a 180-degree difference in terms of the welcome we’ve received and the fact that we’re able to be an anchor institution in this area.”

Money follows money, and the Cummings donation had the immediate effect of attracting other donors. It was the building block of what has become a large coalition of private, philanthropic, and public donors. (The City of Boston has kicked in $4 million.)

“It came at a point when not many people had heard us tell our story,” Francis told me. “But it amplified the work we were doing. And it also gave us the confidence to make bigger asks, to get people to write bigger checks.”

Not that the donors deserve all the credit: Francis has proved to be quite adept at persuading people to get behind the school’s new vision and to write some big checks. In the past three years, the school has raised $47 million. That wouldn’t be an impressive number for many colleges and universities around town.

But for a two-year school teaching people to enter the trades, and led by a Black woman, it’s nothing Boston has seen before.

What it means for hundreds of families is a gateway to middle-class jobs to which they have rarely had access. When we talk about inequality and wealth gaps, this school is one of the ways those inequities begin to get addressed, and to close.

The school can also be a significant economic catalyst for its new neighborhood. Nubian Square, for me, is a work in progress — ever on the cusp of taking off, but never quite doing so. Having a newly developed college at its center can only help.

The failure of a longstanding institution to survive into a new era is an old story. That almost happened to this school, but it didn’t. Against heavy odds, it managed to write a new chapter, in a neighborhood that needs all that the school will bring to it.