Four programs
After-school. Summer. Mentoring. College readiness.
Each program runs on a three-year arc and connects to the next. Most young people enroll in seventh or eighth grade and stay through twelfth. The work is the same week to week. That is the point.
After-School
Open Monday through Thursday, three to seven, in school term. Three hours of homework time supervised by mentors and program staff, dinner cooked by a rotating roster of volunteer parents, an hour of structured activity.
Cohort caps at twelve in each building. Young people enroll for the full school year, not session by session. The same mentor sits at the same table on the same afternoon, week after week. The familiarity is most of the work.
What we do not do here: tutoring as a paid service, drop-in homework help, single-session enrichment. Other organizations do that work well. Ours is different.
Summer Programs
Six weeks of full-day programming, July first through August fifteenth. Civic field trips across the city: Eastern State Penitentiary, the Mural Arts walks, the Free Library archive, the Navy Yard. Paid internships at Philadelphia partner organizations for cohorts aged sixteen and up.
The summer enrollment runs the same young people from the school-year cohorts plus a small number of new participants from referring schools. Continuity matters; we do not run a separate summer-only program.
Internship partners include three Philadelphia hospitals, a city department, two architectural practices, and a cluster of independent businesses on Passyunk Avenue.
Mentoring
Volunteer mentors paired one-to-one with a young person for a minimum of two years. Pairing is done in-person at the building. Mentors complete a four-month onboarding (background check, two interviews, a half-day program-shadow, a child-protection course, and a written agreement) before pairing.
The two-year minimum is non-negotiable. Mentors who cannot commit to two years are encouraged to volunteer in another capacity. The cost of a broken pairing on a young person who has been let down before is the reason for the rule.
Currently eighty active pairs across the three buildings. Approximately forty percent of mentors are alumni of Philadelphia public schools.
College Readiness
Begins in junior year. Application coaching, essay drafts and revisions, FAFSA support, three campus visits per cohort, and alumni follow-up through the first year of college.
We are honest with young people about which paths fit them. College is one path. Trade certification, military service, and direct-to-work are others. The program is called college readiness because that is what most participants choose. It is not a college pipeline.
First-year persistence among alumni who entered college: eighty-four percent. Four-year graduation rate: sixty-one percent.
A site visit is the best way to see this.
Wednesdays and Thursdays, three to five, by appointment. We will not show you a polished tour. We will show you the buildings as they run.