College Visions guide Claire Orsi, right, listens as Feinstein High School senior Jhan Frias speaks with a visitor at the organization’s office at AS220.

The Providence Journal / Andrew Dickerman

PROVIDENCE — On the second floor of AS220’s Empire Street office, dreams are made.

This is where College Visions, an upstart nonprofit organization, helps high school students make college a reality.

College Visions is itself the vision of one man, Simon Moore, a Brown University graduate and Classical High School alumnus who believes that urban teenagers deserve the same help getting into college as their affluent peers.

“I grew up in Providence across from Hope High School and I had a ton of friends who were perfectly capable of going to college but didn’t because of family circumstances or a lack of information about what college entailed,” Moore said. “Given how important a college education is, it’s not OK to have these reasons become a barrier to college.”

College Visions is all about building strong personal relationships between adviser and student. Because guidance counselors are typically overwhelmed by huge caseloads, they often don’t have the time to guide students, many of whom are first-time college-goers, through the thorny application process.

At College Visions, advisers help students research the right colleges, write college essays, fill out financial aid forms and apply for scholarships. They set deadlines, then press students to make them. Sometimes, the most important thing that advisers do is hold students’ hands.

“We’re not a program for academic superstars,” Moore said frankly. “We have value for the student who is just scraping by as well as the student who is earning As and Bs.”

In recent conversations with a handful of high school seniors at AS220, several mentioned that their guidance counselors do not set high expectations. The bar is typically set at Community College of Rhode Island, not the University of Rhode Island, much less Northeastern University or Boston College.

But Moore said, “We push students to think beyond their typical horizons.”

Maegan Burke, who applied to 12 colleges last year, said she never would have applied to Goucher College in Baltimore without Moore’s guidance. When Burke was wait-listed at Goucher, Moore helped her put together a letter of appeal that pushed her over the top. College Visions also flew Burke to Maryland so she could visit the campus to see if it was a good fit.

Steven Gacin, whose first choice is Howard University, in Washington, D.C., is the third member of his family to benefit from the advice offered by advisers at College Visions.

“Without them, I’d be going through the college process alone,” he said. “It’s extremely tedious, but they stay on top of me.”

Without College Visions, Gacin said he would never have applied for a highly competitive Gates Millennial scholarship, which fills the gap between financial aid and tuition.

Moore entered the nonprofit world the way his mentors did: He had a smart idea.

After graduating from Brown in 2000, Moore worked at an innovative public high school in the Bronx, where enrollment was capped at 200 students and personal relationships formed the backbone of the curriculum. Moore had the luxury of working as a college adviser to a senior class of only 40 students.

When he returned to Rhode Island three years later, Moore knew that he wanted to get involved in college advising but in a nontraditional setting. Moore was reluctant to join the public schools because guidance counselors were so overloaded that it would difficult for him to build the kinds of personal relationships with students that he was used to.

“You are entrusting this huge portion of your life to your college adviser,” he said. “An adviser needs to know you well. He or she needs to know the multiple aspects of your personality.”

Moore decided that he wanted to create his own nonprofit organization. He began talking to people who had founded their own nonprofit organizations, such as Tyler Denmead, the former director of New Urban Arts, and Umberto Crenca, the director of AS220, the city’s art space.

Crenca not only offered Moore space at AS220, he created a federally funded AmeriCorps position to help Moore get started. College Visions began with a budget of only $19,000. Three years later, the budget has blossomed to $150,000 and College Visions has added four fulltime advisers that counsel 65 high school seniors, most of them from Providence.

College Visions is in the middle of evaluating where it goes from here. Moore would like to involve parents in a more meaningful way and says he is more than willing to share his knowledge with other schools and student organizations.

“In five years, we will have all of this expertise and we’d like to make it available to a broader number of people,” he said. “We’re never going to become huge, but maybe we can expand the services we provide”

Although College Visions is working with a limited database, 90 percent of its students are still in college. Nationally, however, the graduation rates are bleak: about 55 percent of students who enroll in college graduate within six years.

In the end, College Visions is only as successful as the relationships forged between students and staff.

“We’re like friends,” said senior Jhan Frias. “I can sit down and talk with [College Visions guide] Claire [Orsi] about anything. With a guidance counselor, I have 20 seconds. Claire has made a huge difference.”

lborg@projo.com