About the 20 Stories Series
To celebrate 20 years of impact, we're sharing 20 stories from the people who’ve made our journey possible. From past participants to longtime partners, these voices reflect the heart of our program. Each story highlights the voices, experiences, and milestones that shaped our community. This is one of them.
Most of the stories in this series appear in written format, but the first one comes as a special interview with Erva Cockfield, one of the program's original advisers. You can watch the full interview here.
A transcript of Erva's interview is below.
My name is Erva Cockfield, and I served at Fluvanna County High School from 2005 to 2007. At the time, the program was called the College Guides Program, and in 2005, I was part of the inaugural class of guides.
I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and I started to learn more about it, and I was like, oh, this sounds really cool because I myself am a first-generation college student. And I was like, okay, this seems like it's targeting a group that is usually not focused on a lot.
So I really had to gain a whole new skill set of talking to people. And then also being young and being perceived as knowing nothing about the world, for me to then be telling people who were much older that you need to give me your financial information so we can fill out these forms or here are the things you need to do.
There were some challenges there, but being able to navigate those conversations, build the relationships with parents - those are all skills that I use now in my day to day job. Because as an attorney, it's really like a customer service profession. You have clients, whether that's a regular person on the street or your client is a company, and you have to meet that person where they are.
You have to be able to listen to like, well, what's your problem? What's your concern? What's bothering you today? How can I help you solve that problem so that we get to the best outcome for you? And learning that skill set really started for me when I was a college guide.
And particularly at Fluvanna County High School, demographically, they didn't have any counselors that were people of color. So I came in as a woman, as a black woman, and some of the kids that maybe had felt that they were overlooked all of a sudden were like, oh, who's this young person that looks like me? I want to go into the library and find out what she's doing. Why is she here?
It almost kind of, like, humbles you in a way. Whenever you meet someone in the street, whatever their background is, you don't just make those assumptions about who they are. Like they don’t have “it” or they weren’t cut out for this. I hope that we break down those misguided assumptions that some of us have when we see someone, maybe who's not where we are in life, and we think that, oh, this person was just lazy, they should have done this. That's not everyone’s story, and most of the time they just needed somebody to help them.
I'm so grateful that we have this program to help students navigate that. The legacy for me is just a reminder that everything you do matters. There are moments when you might be even doubting yourself. I had those times where I was like, I'm 20-whatever, What am I doing? Am I doing this SAT prep course correctly? Am I doing this correctly? But you are! You are making the impact even when you don't see it.
Because there going to be students who are going to be talking about you in rooms where you're not there, and about how you made all the difference.
What we started pretty much as like guinea pigs in an experiment 20 years ago has not only grown, but is thriving and making all of this impact.