Dine In for UrbanFUTURE

In 2009, more students dropped out of high school than graduated from the St. Louis Public Schools! UrbanFUTURE is working to change that, and YOU can help, and it's as simple as bringing your lunch to work for one day.

On October 27th, UrbanFUTURE is hosting, Dine In for UrbanFUTURE, a virtual event in which participants bring their lunch to work/school and donate the money they would’ve spent going out to lunch to UrbanFUTURE. You can make your donation online or mail it to:

UrbanFUTURE
3145 S. Grand Blvd.
Ste. A
St. Louis, MO 63118

The suggested donation is $10, the cost for a student to enroll in UrbanFUTURE for a single day. Your lunch donation will go a long way to making sure more urban youth will have opportunities to succeed in high school and beyond.

But this event is meant to be more than a fundraiser. We want people to use the lunch period on October 27th discussing and debating the academic achievement gap that persists in urban (and rural) districts across the country. Hopefully this will become a part of a larger conversation you can have with family, friends, classmates and co-workers. It is an issue that affects every single one of our lives now and in the future, but every single one of us can do something about it.

Please help us spread the word about this event and UrbanFUTURE. Together we can help close the achievement gap and help urban youth see and believe in their possibilities!

UrbanFUTURE's Solution to Eliminating the Academic Achievement Gap

The following post is text from a recent grant request that UrbanFUTURE submitted for the Bank of America Neighborhood Builder's program. This represents UrbanFUTURE's strategy and vision for solving the academic achievement gap in urban schools.

Poverty is an age-old problem in our nation’s urban communities. In order to solve this problem, the educational achievement gap must be bridged—one community cluster at a time. UF defines the community cluster according to the public school system’s geographical zoning. Each “community cluster” revolves around a hub middle school and the elementary schools that feed it. Utilizing the community cluster approach, UF reaches every school-aged child in a given zip code who shares a common educational path.

Once the cluster is defined, UF approaches supplemental education by recognizing the isolation that exists between three primary groups – the home, the school and the community. Our key initiative is the UrbanFUTURE Restoration Model, which seeks to repair the traditional bonds between home, school, and community that poverty has broken. UF staff brokers these connections and is housed within the school building, allowing the school to serve as a center for these groups to connect through our innovative mentoring and tutoring programs. Through this community-cluster based restoration model, we are addressing generational poverty at individual, institutional and community-wide levels.

The primary objective of the Restoration Model is to ensure that 4th through 8th grade students possess the academic acumen to master high school as well as the mindset to see and believe in their possibilities. To achieve this vision, UF focuses on five key outcomes: literacy, academic growth, character formation, parental involvement, and career preparation. The combination of these focal points creates a formula for success in eliminating the achievement gap.

This is what UrbanFUTURE believes will solve the academic achievement gap and in turn help communities out of poverty.