Building Lives of Achievement, Reach & Empowerment

The BLARE Foundation was a Southlake, Texas nonprofit that worked with first-generation students across Dallas-Fort Worth. It was registered as a 501(c)(3) and operated from 2021 to 2023. It is no longer active and is not accepting donations, applications, or volunteers.

It was never formalized into programs. What it did was direct contact — repeated conversations with students and the families around them.

What that contact showed: first-generation students are not short on information. They are short on a reference set — the options that never appear on a list because no one in the household named them. Advice from outside the household loses to advice from inside it. That is the design problem, not an occasional failure.

The foundation closed. The work did not. It continues under Ronell Smith directly, without an organization, because the effective unit was always a person in repeated contact rather than a program delivering a service.

Ronell Smith — ronellsmith.com — ronell@ronellsmith.com