Fort Worth nonprofit founder jokes her life is a movie. TCU students put it on screen

Some days, Ricquel Archer can hardly believe her life. 

Students walk in. Volunteers show up. It’s an ordinary workday at Create + Collaborate, the nonprofit Archer started in 2020 to support first-generation students like she was to navigate college. Growing up, she couldn’t picture a room like that. Now she gets to open the door, and the people inside have changed her life, too, she said. 

“I jokingly used to say, and I still say it, but my life is a movie,” Archer said. 

The version of her life that played Monday ran 19 minutes and 41 seconds. Archer was in the audience to watch “Trailblazers: The Create + Collaborate Story” at the Lone Star Film Festival in Fort Worth. The short documentary, made by Texas Christian University students, follows Archer and the students whom her nonprofit helps stay in college. 

The story began when TCU student Darius Ford needed to furnish his first dorm room. Archer, who had mentored him since his senior year of high school through her position at Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Tarrant County, put together an Amazon wish list to get him moved in. Then she kept coming up with what Ford would need after move-in day. 

Archer went looking for a program to support students like Ford. Instead, she wound up building one. 

Create + Collaborate serves more than 200 students across 52 college campuses, Archer said. Dorm supplies are still on the wish list. So are mentors and workshops to help students find their footing in college and prepare for work. Archer, meanwhile, runs the nonprofit full time as her career.

When new students join the nonprofit, Archer usually sends them to students like Ford, who can tell them what it meant to be the first in their families to attend college.

If these students could tell their stories, she figured she could tell hers when an opportunity presented itself, Archer said. 

“I have a first-gen experience too, and I do have a story to tell,” she said.

When TCU instructor Charity Robinson asked if her documentary production class could film the nonprofit, Archer agreed right there over Zoom. 

“Let me just say yes before I think about it or get too many details,” Archer recalled telling Robinson. 

Between late 2024 and spring 2025, TCU students showed up to the nonprofit’s events with cameras. They dug through old photos and videos and came back after the semester ended to film graduation footage at nearby universities for students who’d gotten the nonprofit’s help. Some of the filmmakers were first-generation students, too, and Archer came to think of them as part of her team. 

“We had literally hundreds or thousands of photos and videos and B-roll interviews and everything,” co-editor Michael Fazen said at the Q&A after the screening.

Director Jonathan Stokx and writer Evan Vaslow went through multiple rewrites. Between the nonprofit’s origin and different students’ journeys navigating college, the filmmakers started realizing they had too many subplots for one short film. 

“So many of them had their own unique stories and important stories to tell,” Stokx said. “But as much as we like these stories and we want to tell them, we’re trying to tell the story of the group and not the individual.”

The movie’s title came a little easier. 

“Almost everyone we interviewed used the word ‘trailblazing’ or ‘a trailblazer,’” Stokx said.

Three nights before the screening, Archer sat down at a dinner to mark six years of Create + Collaborate. At the table were students she’d once helped, who now are volunteers and monthly donors. Archer asked a student for one word to describe what the nonprofit meant to them. Then the nonprofit’s alumni president asked Archer for hers.

Family, she said.

As she looked around, Archer took in what she had created. 

“I genuinely feel like I’m living a life that I love, and it is a movie that I want to watch over and over and over again,” she said. 

Dang Le is the higher education reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at [email protected]. 

The Fort Worth Report partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

The Report’s higher education coverage is supported in part by major higher education institutions in Tarrant County, including Tarleton State University, Tarrant County College, Texas A&M-Fort Worth Christian University, Texas Wesleyan University, the University of Texas at Arlington and UNT Health Fort Worth. 

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