Hands Across California

A Dramatic Event to Support California’s Community Colleges

Hands Across California will bring Californians statewide together to benefit California’s community colleges and their students.

California’s community college system is the largest in the nation—112 colleges spanning the state and providing education and job training to nearly 3 million students every year. Yet every day, students struggle to pay for the cost of an education and face the difficult decision of giving up their educational dreams for lack of funds.

The Foundation for California Community Colleges has partnered with Ken Kragen, architect of “We Are The World,” “Hands Across America,” and “NetAid,” to create a once-in-a-generation event bringing California together in support of community colleges and their students.

Just a month before the 25th anniversary of the original “Hands Across America,” which saw 6.5 million Americans join hands from California to New York in a continuous line through 17 states, Hands Across California will create a unified statewide spectacle illustrating the impact of community colleges in the state, raise funds to benefit the California Community Colleges Scholarship Endowment, create vast public awareness of the value of our colleges to their communities, and spawn unprecedented corporate partnerships, philanthropic investments, and community involvement supporting all of our colleges and students statewide.

The event will literally join nearly all of the 112 community colleges in California in a vast statewide human line stretching from San Diego to Sacramento, with connected legs to the line reaching into the Inland Empire, Central Valley, and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles regions.

Hands Across California will involve more than 1 million people—students, faculty, staff, alumni, friends, and supporters of California’s community colleges—and will stretch more than 1,000 miles.

Twenty-five years ago, “Hands Across America” raised funds to combat hunger and homelessness. Access to education and job training is perhaps the single greatest deterrent to those conditions, and California’s community colleges are the one system of higher education in the state open to all who seek it. Yet even with the lowest student fees in the nation, the added costs of attending a community college—textbooks, software, uniforms, equipment and other supplies needed for the wide variety of job training and transfer education programs—can be unreasonable to those in poverty.

To make this unparalleled and unique event a reality and bring new awareness of the needs of California Community College students, your support is needed. Join us for Hands Across California!

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