CURRENT YOUTH PROGRAMS

2010 AAU Summer Youth Program

Our Vision
The AAU Summer Program is a youth leadership program and a summer school for children. By training high school and college students to be teachers and mentors to children in their community, we simultaneously:

• serve an unmet community need for affordable summer enrichment programs;
• provide positive role models for children;
• enhance children’s learning with a multicultural literacy-based interactive curriculum, project-based learning, and caring tutors and mentors;
• create the opportunity for youth to make real world contributions to their communities;
• bridge generations, and
• develop their academic, leadership, and personal skills that will serve them throughout their lives.

Currently, 14 high school and college students have been trained to be teachers for four classes. They are team teaching the classes while also learning leadership and organizing skills. They are teaching 42 children that are will enter grades 2 to 9 in the Fall of 2010. The classes are divided up into a grade 2 class, a grade 3 class, a grades 5 to 7 class, and a middle school class. The curriculum includes leadership training and team-building, a community action project connected to AAU’s Greening Project, martial arts, sports, games, visual arts, music, history and cultural appreciation.

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AAU High School Youth Leadership Program

Following in the long tradition of our first summer program, AAU continues to work with high school students to provide leadership training and opportunities for them to mentor and tutor younger students. AAU provides training and support for high school students who volunteer as tutors and mentors in the FACTS aftercare program. FACTS after care is a homework help and enrichment program for 25 FACTS students who attend kindergarten through 6th grade (and that is run by AAU youth alumna, Anh Ha and two other FACTS staffers). AAU Executive Director Ellen Somekawa and Anh worked to design training sessions for high school students that were supportive and team building, helped them understand the needs of the FACTS students, and nurtured their potential for being positive role models and mentors to the FACTS students.

This youth leadership program has distinct cycles that correspond with FACTS marking periods. The high school tutors who participated in the first cycle were pleased by the positive impact they had on the FACTS program and its students; many are continuing on in the second cycle. Thanks to our dedicated, responsible and caring volunteers: Jessica Do, Kenneth Huang, Xin Lin, Dior Miller, Winnie Rao, Stephanie Tran, Ada Wu, Yan Zhang who successfully finished our first session. Another crew is now starting up for the second session.

We are still recruiting volunteers who are prepared to commit to a regular weekly schedule of volunteering and who are willing to come to training and evaluation meetings. Send us an email at esomekawa @ mac.com to find out when the next orientation and training session will be held.

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