How You Can Join Us
Aspire’s 15-Year Vision: Every Bay Area student will have access to an educational mentor.
Educational equity is an achievable goal. But it requires not only the support of teachers and school leaders, but the communities around them.
For the first time, for every hour of paid private tutoring this year, Aspire was able to provide an hour of one-on-one educational mentorship to an underserved student. And that doesn’t include the hundreds of hours of class and group tutoring we also provided. Meanwhile, every year, Aspire continues to train hundreds of high school students in social-emotional skills and pairs them with younger students to mentor in early literacy.
Yet there is one significant resource we have yet to mobilize: adults in the community.
With the world changing faster than ever, it is paramount that underserved students are prepared for the economy of the future, not just the present. With the tech boom, STEM employment is growing at a rate of 17% every year. Yet the biggest achievement gap in Bay Area public schools is happening in middle school math, most egregiously in Oakland where less than half of the students who are performing in math at grade level entering Grade 5 stay on grade level through Grade 11. We have a plan to address the achievement gap in middle school math.
Through 15 years of selecting, training, and mobilizing transformative tutors, for the first time we will now also be selecting qualified adult volunteers, engaging them in comprehensive training and matching them with middle school students for one- on-one Math tutoring. Training and matching will begin virtually January 2021 and will require a weekly one-hour commitment from volunteers. The STEM gap is growing and more critical than ever. It’s time we address it.
There are two ways you can be a part of this new and important effort:
Partner with us
Most educational programming in the Bay is much more expensive than you would think. However, with this program, utilizing highly-qualified volunteers in a high-needs area, every $1,000 will be used to empower four students every week for an entire semester.
Volunteer
Every person who joins will not only be highly trained and supported, but be invited into a diverse community of passionate, committed volunteers. If you’re interested in learning more, sign up here.