“A small organization with a big mission“
Our organization is dedicated to providing academic assistance to students who are struggling in school during this pandemic. Since this pandemic has caused difficulty for schools to continue to support their students, we strive to make things easier for students by providing assistance from their laptop or their phone.
Goal: Simply, we are working toward closing the educational gap between low-income/minority students and the privileged students. To decrease this educational gap, we founded The Gift of Learning. We believe that education is priceless and should be a basic right, not a privilege. It shouldn’t come with a price tag. Our goal is to pass on the information we have already learned and use it to help students who need help on it for free. We provide tutoring and one-time help as well. We offer tutoring in Math, Science, Social Studies, English, Computer Science, and Art. We run on a completely volunteer basis, which makes our tutors even more dedicated to their students!
Community Involvement: Service is a way for us to give back to our community and have a direct impact on the lives of others. Although we are currently amid a pandemic, we refuse to let that cause halt in education. Children are our future. They are our future doctors, lawyers, police officers, and more. We believe we must lay the educational groundwork for them. Additionally, since our tutors have one on one tutoring sessions with their students, our students can form a social and emotional bond with their tutors. After their eight week sessions, our students don’t consider them simply as their teachers. They consider them their partner, mentor, and friend.
Challenges We faced: We were completely new to this and had a lot of trial and error in the process. A major issue we had was getting students. Since all of the tutors were around our age, and most of them followed us on Instagram, it was easy to reach out to them and convince them to join our organization. We watched the number of our tutors go up, but the students remained the same. Soon we realized that our advertising techniques needed to be improved. We discussed it and decided that we should advertise through our parents’ social platforms by posting on Next Door, a neighborhood connections app, and Facebook, where the audience was mostly parents. From there, the number of students finally began to grow! The first round of tutoring began successfully! Our first Round had around 100 tutors and 170 students. However we soon realized that although we were able to expand our organization out to parents, most of the students that were getting tutored didn’t really need the help, they just wanted extra preparation before the school year started. While we were happy to provide this service to them, we wanted to reach more students who were genuinely struggling in school and could not afford tutoring services. Due to this, we realized that the only way we could reach out to these families was through their school counselors. We began emailing the counselors of local elementary schools and were glad that we were finally able to make a significant impact on a child’s education.
Vision: We are actively working on reaching out to underprivileged and low-income families. Since we do not have a lot of contacts who know of areas with underprivileged students, it has been difficult reaching out to them. Reaching out to these families is really important to us because so far we have only been able to reach out to families who have children who need help with a particular subject. While we are more than happy to help their children, we know that they are more than able to afford paid tutoring services. Through this and many other articles and blog posts about us, we hope to reach out to different individuals who would like to be a part of this amazing program!
Find Contact Details on the Contributors Page.
Teens Talk 