The extra mile
Norwalk man runs to send kids to college
NORWALK — Tristan Fields has little more than a month to prepare for his first half marathon. It’s a potentially disconcerting deadline.
“I’m not a runner. I work out, but I never ran anything more than three miles,” Fields said Tuesday night in the Children’s Room of the South Norwalk Branch Library,
where elementary school students were being tutored by teachers from Fields’ nonprofit, Higher Education Literacy Partners, or HELP.
Fields undertook the challenge and will run in the South Norwalk Marathon on Oct. 20 to raise money and awareness for HELP, which was founded with the goal of increasing access to higher education for underrepresented groups. It offers after-school homework help to elementary, middle and high school students, but also offers the College Edge Program, which provides college-readiness workshops, SAT test preparation lessons, college tours, and private coaching sessions.
Fields began a Crowdrise fundraising campaign and began training in late July. He was gaining momentum until he was briefly sidelined by an ankle injury.
“Just like anything else there are bumps in the road. I got injured a little bit, but I’m back on it. I’ve been training hard, running in the morning, getting to know the Norwalk hills,” Fields said.
He wakes up early each morning to run before traveling to the Bronx, where he works at the KIPP New York City College Prep High School as a college readiness teacher. After school, he commutes home to Norwalk, where he lives with his wife and children, and does tutoring and college prep work with HELP students until as late as 9 p.m. some nights.
“This is my life, helping kids,” Fields said.
Fields was inspired to start HELP, in part, after witnessing the ways in which underrepresented students could thrive when given sufficient resources at his charter school.
“We’re really well resourced,” Fields said of his school. “So one of the things I can clearly see is that you can close the achievement gap as long as you provide resources and effective instruction.”
He launched HELP in 2015 with board members Jeffery Kennerly and Jermaine Miller. The group employs a staff or professional teachers and volunteers who lead tutoring groups.
Fields said he hopes to lay a blueprint for students who might not otherwise view college as an option, or who might not have seen family members or friends around them go to college. In his groups, he hopes that underclassmen can learn from the upperclassmen who have benefited from the program and gone on to college. He wants to set up a mentoring program to open up a dialogue between alumni and those currently utilizing HELP services and to ex- pand the group, which in the past year has served about 100 elementary and middle school students and 50 high school students.
“One of the biggest things I’m trying to work on is developing a college-going culture and expectations for our kids, particularly our kids of color. There are a lot of messages in the media and when they look around, saying this is not necessarily a space for you,” Fields said. “But I’m trying to send a message that, this is what we do. It takes a lot of work, and we’re gonna help you get there and you’re going to be better for it.”
As of Sept. 12, Fields’ Crowdrise had raised $1,200 and has a goal of $3,000. All proceeds will go to the nonprofit.
“In many ways, these kids are doing something they’ve never done before. Every- thing is kind of a marathon for them, whether it be two hours on reading and math, or SAT prep, everything is a new thing that they’ve never done before that seems really daunting,” Fields said. “So I figured, let me try this new thing and hopefully it’ll inspire more people to support this work.”