The five University of Delaware students in charge of Lazarus Rising are (from left) James Celia, Mathew Sobel, Mathew Rojas, Eric Albers and Nathan Hamilton.

Fighting homelessness

UD students compete for program funding to benefit the homeless

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1:07 p.m., April 4, 2016--Five University of Delaware students are on a mission. Nathan Hamilton of the College of Engineering and four colleagues from the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics – Eric Albers, James Celia, Matthew Rojas and Mathew Sobel – are fighting homelessness through a program that provides job placement skills to those without permanent housing.

The student team is participating in First Step Grand Challenges in an effort to win the $25,000 in prize, seed and grant money awarded to top entries. Hamilton, Celia, Albers and Rojas are in the University's Honors Program.  

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First Step Grand Challenges is a year-long, mentored challenge for undergraduate students to develop solutions to societal problems. The competition is set for Wednesday, April 6, at 6 p.m. in the Health Sciences Complex Atrium at UD’s Science, Technology and Advanced Research (STAR) Campus.

First Step is a collaborative program of University of Delaware College of Health Sciences and the Horn Program for Entrepreneurship

The team’s social enterprise, Lazarus Rising, is a program model in which university student volunteers hold workshops at homeless shelters where they teach residents job placement skills. 

The model calls for two workshops. The first focuses on resume writing and the second on preparing for job interviews and using job portal websites. 

“Presently, there are more than 600,000 people who experience homelessness on any given night in the United States,” says Rojas, founder, chairman and CEO. “A truly vicious cycle exists between the growing homeless population and the lack of competitive job placement skills amongst this group, ensuring that this crisis will continue to subsist unless something is done to break this cycle.”

Lazarus Rising is currently active in Newark and Wilmington, Delaware. 

According to Vince DiFelice, Horn Program’s venture support lead, “The Lazarus Rising team have proven their model at UD and now are bringing their social enterprise to other universities, empowering the homeless in other communities while providing a valuable learning opportunity to students in other parts of the county.”

The idea came from an experience Rojas had as a freshman. While updating his resume, he realized that skill and training are required to write a polished resume, so he reached out to a local homeless shelter with the idea to host a resume workshop for its residents. This experience led to the founding of Lazarus Rising.

In fall 2015, the team was accepted as a VentureOn team in the Horn Program for Entrepreneurship. The VentureOn program supports and provides resources to promising and early stage startups at UD. Currently, the Horn Program supports 30 VentureOn teams. 

About the Horn Program in Entrepreneurship

The Horn Program ignites imaginations and empowers world changers through entrepreneurial education.

The program’s offerings emphasize experiential learning, evidence-based entrepreneurship and active engagement with entrepreneurs, business leaders and members of the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Participation in Horn Program courses and co-curricular activities empowers students by providing them with the knowledge, skills, connections and access to resources needed to successfully manifest innovation and thrive in a rapidly changing world.

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