Hosted by First Gen & Juice (@firstgenandjuice IG) and the Empowering First Generation Students Facebook group, the Catalyst Awards honor books (fiction and non-fiction), films, television shows and podcasts that feature first-generation characters and storylines in a given year. The goals of the awards are to celebrate complex storytelling about the first-generation college experience and…
How to incorporate CODA movie into first-gen student programming
Like many people across the country, we cheered when the indie film CODA (Children of Deaf Adults) won an Academy Award for Best Picture in 2022 having already snagged a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. CODA is a coming-of-age movie about a high school senior who…
2021 Catalyst Award winners
Congratulations to all of the nominees! We accept nominations year-round!
2021 Catalyst Award nominees
Hosted by First Gen & Juice, the Catalyst Awards honor books (fiction and non-fiction), films, television shows and podcasts that feature first-generation characters and storylines in a given year. The goals of the awards are to celebrate complex storytelling about the first-generation college experience and to increase the visibility of the first-generation identity within popular…
The Ultimate List of First-Gen Characters on Television
There is a long history of first-generation college characters on television from John-Boy Walton to Kelly Kapowski. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of these characters for your bingeing or nostalgic pleasure. Although it is rare for the term “first-gen” to be used on the shows, the characters themselves certainly have common first-gen experiences, including applying…
You Can Do This Hard Thing: A First-Gen Soundtrack
Can’t leave rap alone, the game needs me Haters want me clapped in chrome, it ain’t easy Cops want to knock me, D.A. wants to box me in But somehow I beat them charges like Rocky –Jay-Z, “Izzo” Daniel Morales’s original call was for a list of songs that are “counter narratives” related to the…
A Room of One’s Own
Things started off pretty innocently. In the context of quarantine, the Empowering First Generation College Students Facebook group was abuzz with posts about the pandemic’s broad impact on first-generation college students and graduates. How are they faring academically, psychologically and emotionally? What are some promising practices to make this experience at least palatable and not…
InFormation
“I’ve been in movement work since I was 16 years old. Black Lives Matter becomes an important part of the story, but it’s not the only part of the story.” –Patrisse Khan-Cullors First-generation college students are generally described as lacking the knowledge, skills and resources necessary to be successful in college. Hence, all of…
When Remote Learning Doesn’t Suck
“Online school is the best.” “I thrive in an online environment.” ~Zoe Miles, unicorn? For reasons too long and complicated to explain here, my daughter ended up attending an online high school for her senior year. Naturally, we were skeptical about this education: was it a real school? Would she learn anything? Is it even…
Spotlight on Awkwafina
“If you don’t have anyone there as an initial inspiration to you, you really don’t think that anything is possible.” Awkwafina on the importance of Asian-American representation in Western media, MTV News, June 2018 As films take on more cast and crew of Asian ethnicity, Asian-American representation has become prominent in Hollywood films. Rather than endorsing…
Feeling The Force: A First-Gen Framework
The whole time I watched [The Force Awakens] in the back of my mind I got the feeling “Star Wars doesn’t work this way”. It feels like a movie made by a fan who didn’t get the universe, which is exactly what it is. Very few people do get it. ~wswordsmen, Reddit, 2017 I…
Origin Story: The Power of TRANSFERmation
The origin often shows just why readers should care about your character and what motivates your character (plus, of course, if your character has powers, how they got them). –Brian Cronin, “The Greatest Superhero Origins of All Time” When I decided to enroll at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I became the first…
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