AcademyStay

Ask Myana where her ambition comes from and she won't point to a hardship. She points to a garden.
This summer she's packing to leave AcademySTAY. Myana just graduated from Sacramento City College with three associate degrees, earned the college's inaugural Gerri Scott Global Changemaker Award, and this fall she transfers to UCLA to study with the faculty who shaped the fields she's spent years reading. She built the move herself, scholarship by scholarship. She could have stayed close and kept being a big fish in a small pond. She chose the big pond instead.
"This is a place that I can sprout in and leap safely onto," she says of AcademySTAY. "Safely take off and figure out where I'm gonna land."
That's what a launch pad is for. Myana's about to prove it in Los Angeles.
Read Myana's story:

Myana's Launch Pad to UCLA Myana came to Sacramento from New Orleans on her own. A year of stable housing at AcademySTAY gave her a place to land, and a place to launch from. This fall, she leaves for UCLA.

We just hit 15,000 safe nights of housing. That's students who had a bed, stability, and us in their corner when they needed it most. Every single night is another chance at finishing school, finding work, healing. That's what 15,000 nights of belonging looks like.
If you've supported AcademySTAY, you're part of this. Thank you.

Fewer than 1 in 10 young adults from foster care will finish a college degree. Not because they can't do the work. Because they're doing it while wondering where they'll sleep tomorrow.
Recent Hilton Foundation research points to what derails them: housing instability, no caregiver to help navigate financial aid, the weight of a label they never chose. At AcademySTAY, that's exactly what we disrupt.
Our students are scholars, workers, and leaders. We pair safe nights of housing with the one-on-one support they need to focus on their education instead of their survival. They're not beating the odds by accident. They're rewriting them.