Summer Vacation....Hardly

School may be out for summer, but UrbanFUTURE is still hard at work. What goes on during the hot and humid summer months at UrbanFUTURE? The answer is A LOT!

The beginning of the summer is filled with data. UrbanFUTURE spends the month of June collecting student data from the school year, compiling it and analyzing it. By the end of June, the analyzed data is put into a that we give to the St. Louis Public Schools.

We also hit the recruiting trail hard during the summer months. You may have even seen us at one of the many Kaldi's locations around the area on Saturday mornings. You may see us at various outdoor concert events donning our "I Am" t-shirts, encouraging people to volunteer as tutors and mentors for the upcoming school year.

With so many new people wanting to volunteer, we have a lot of training that needs to get done before school starts in August. Team Leaders have been working hard to refine the mentor and tutor training so volunteers are better prepared for the rigors of being an UrbanFUTURE volunteer. New trainings will start in July. In addition to fine-tuning the training, Team Leaders are busy making modifications to the mentoring and tutoring curriculum based on the feedback of our current tutors and mentors and will unveil the new curriculum to volunteers during training.

UrbanFUTURE's expansion plans have also had us in hiring mode. Over 125 individuals applied for the Team Leader position during the one month window. Staff have been logging long hours conducting phone interviews trying to find the best candidates. The final round of interviews will come over the weekend of July 9th, and final decisions will be made the next week.

Finally, development staff has stayed busy writing and submitting proposals to foundations, meeting with potential donors and working with volunteers for the annual campaign in the fall. Also being planned is an UrbanFUTURE trivia night, "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" style. This will be the first such event for UrbanFUTURE!

So while some might think that things slow down in summer, UrbanFUTURE knows things are speeding along just fine.