Following leadership upheaval, CCP prepares to hold major annual fundraiser for student scholarships

Fatima Abbas’ family didn’t have a lot of money for college and she didn’t feel she was entirely ready for a four-year program, having been homeschooled for high school because of concern about violence at the local public school.

The Community College of Philadelphia proved the perfect path for her, she said.

“I was really excited about all the transfer programs that CCP had with local schools like Temple,” Abbas said, “and the amount of assistance that they provided students in transitioning into the college world.”

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Now, more than two decades later, with a bachelor’s from Temple, a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and a prestigious job as inaugural director of the Office of Tribal and Native Affairs at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, she’s more convinced than ever it was the right choice.

The family liked CCP so much that her mother, a licensed therapist, and her younger brother, a data scientist, graduated from there too, she said.

“We became a CCP family, just because they made it easy to access higher education,” said Abbas, 38, who lives near Baltimore.

Abbas will speak June 12 at the college’s annual Black & Gold Gala fundraiser for student scholarships and support services, titled: And We Rise: A Night of Student Hope and Community Renewal. She is receiving the alumni achievement award.

The gala comes at a turbulent time for the college. Just a couple of months ago, the college was embroiled in a public and legal battle with its former president Donald Guy Generals, who had led the school for nearly 11 years. The board voted in April not to renew his contract and placed him on immediate paid administrative leave through June 30.

Generals called the decision not to renew his contract unjustified and the move to place him on leave retaliatory. He sued to obtain a special injunction that would have restored him to his position through the end of his contract, but lost.

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The drama created dissension on the college’s foundation board, its fundraising arm. Ellyn Jo Waller, who led the foundation board, resigned in opposition to the decision to oust Generals. Her husband, the Rev. Alyn E. Waller, longtime senior pastor of Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church in East Mount Airy, which with about 15,000 members has one of Philadelphia’s largest congregations, said at a subsequent sermon he would no longer support the school or encourage others to do so.

Tim Spreitzer, the new president of the foundation board, said officials are now focused on making the forthcoming gala a success, not on what happened a couple of months ago.

“It’s just keeping focused as it should be on the students and those success stories and what profound difference and impact that these funds make in a student’s life,” said Spreitzer, executive vice president at Brian Communications.

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CCP started the gala in 2018, and it usually raises $3.5 million, or about $600,000 annually for student scholarships, Spreitzer said. The college, he said, is on track to deliver the same performance this year. And tables and tickets are still available for purchase, he said.

The scholarships are particularly important to CCP students, about 70% of whom are eligible for federal Pell grants, geared toward lower-income families, said Alycia Marshall, interim president. The college also awards scholarships to high-performing students who need financial assistance in transitioning to a four-year college.

Some students get full tuition scholarships of up to $4,000 and some partial, depending on the need, she said. About 400 students have benefited from the scholarships since the gala started, the college said.

Abbas didn’t get a CCP scholarship, but got financial support at Temple and Berkeley.

“These scholarships, while they’re small, when you’re low-income, can really make the difference between those students staying in for another semester [or not],” she said.

While at Temple, she was accepted to the London School of Economics, but couldn’t afford to go. She worked for a year after Temple and still couldn’t afford it, she said.

And, she’s still paying off loans from Berkeley, where she got her degree in 2011. She can’t imagine what she would have done if she also had undergraduate debt.

“If not for CCP, I would not be as far along in my journey because the debt is really hard,” said Abbas, a Philadelphia native who mostly grew up in the city and entered CCP at 16. “It’s like a second mortgage.”

After law school, she worked at the Philadelphia law firm Fox Rothschild, then moved to the Mojave Desert to serve as deputy attorney general for the Colorado River Indian Tribes, having aspired to do economic development work for tribes when she was in law school.

Abbas is part American Indian. Her mother is part of the Haliwa-Saponi tribe in North Carolina, and her father is from Pakistan.

In Colorado, her work spanned from water law to rape cases. She later moved to California to serve as general counsel for another tribe, then moved back to Washington, D.C., when a chance to do tribal advocacy law opened and she could be closer to her family.

She worked on helping tribes attain $30 billion in pandemic relief funds and then got a job with the treasury to help administer the program. It was supposed to be a one-year appointment but the treasury created an office and made her the first director. Her work varies from helping a tribe understand how to implement small-business financing to helping others with tax policy.

“There’s really strong bipartisan support, so we haven’t had any challenges in continuing our work,” she said.

In her speech at the gala, she intends to emphasize the importance of nontraditional paths to higher education, which CCP provides.

“When I was at CCP, one of the things I appreciated is that students were coming from such different backgrounds,” she said. “You had folks who had been out of school for 20 years, those who had only a GED. ... We were all trying to obtain an education ... to improve our economic conditions.

“That’s the mentality of a lot of CCP alumni, which is that we don’t come from privileged backgrounds, but we can still access privilege through working really hard and through the education that CCP provides, the scholarships that they provide, and the strong alumni support network, too.”