Empowering Youth: Enhancing Academic Success Through Tutoring - We Raise Foundation

Empowering Youth: Enhancing Academic Success Through Tutoring

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Empowering Youth: Enhancing Academic Success Through Tutoring, Chicago, Ill.

  • Sponsoring Organization: Sunshine Gospel Ministries
  • City/State: Chicago, Ill.
  • Grant Program: Grants Plus
  • Grant Amount: $100,000

Project Summary:

Since 1905, Sunshine Gospel Ministries has served alongside youth and families in disadvantaged, under-resourced, and disinvested communities throughout Chicago. Today, they offer a wide range of services for residents of the Woodlawn community.

Sunshine is a leading provider of supplemental educational services in Woodlawn. Their youth outreach staff has observed that their students tend to be multiple grade levels behind in math and reading. Approximately 95% of their elementary program students attend Fiske Elementary School, which, according to research, places in the bottom 50% of test scores with a math proficiency of 3% and a reading proficiency of 8%. Only 25% of Woodlawn residents have a high school degree and just 13% of the population has a bachelor’s degree.

Sunshine Gospel Ministries’ tutoring program is a powerful tool that will provide critical opportunities and necessary resources for youth in Woodlawn. With the grant from We Raise, Sunshine will be able to elevate their program offerings by providing targeted academic intervention to improve reading and math capabilities. This tutoring program builds upon their current homework assistance support by formalizing the approach and bringing in experienced support.

Sunshine plans to hire eight part-time trained tutors for five hours a week for 32 weeks per year. The planned 32 weeks represent the weeks that Sunshine’s youth outreach programs are in session throughout the school year and summer. During youth outreach school year programs, there is a dedicated hour for each age group to receive homework assistance. The eight tutors will tutor youth in groups of five for 30 minutes two of the four days of programming a week. One day will be dedicated to reading and one day will be dedicated to math. This will allow for the majority of the youth to receive at least one tutoring session per week.

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