R.I.S.E. is an outreach program to assist high school seniors of Pacific Islander heritage transition to college. Participants engage with UW students and staff to gain awareness of the UW's campus resources, admissions process, writing, scholarship, and cultural workshops. Current UW Pacific Islander students play a major role in facilitating educational and empowerment workshops for participants. Community leaders and faculty are also invited to participate as facilitators to share their unique cultural heritage and experiences.
Conference Theme: "The Ocean In Us"
The theme for this year's conference is a charge for all students of Pacific Islander heritage to unify and advance our Pacific Islander communities by utilizing higher education as a key for survival.
"I think that how people make a living, how they survive, and how their culture evolves are all interrelated, Pacific Islanders are ocean people and they are very tied to the ocean. They know how to live within that ocean environment and to survive in it. I think that people who for generations almost without end have evolved in an ocean world evolved a much different way of seeing the world than people who lived in large land masses like continents...
... Pondering the difference between the perceptions of continental people and Pacific islanders goes something like this: survival is the engine of world view; Pacific people had to sail to survive: whenever they sailed out from their home islands, they found new ones. Therefore even though the islands they lived on may have been small, to our ancestors of long ago the sea and the islands it contained must have seemed infinite...
... We sweat and cry saltwater, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood."
- Epeli Hau'ofa
RISE Application