about change the tune:
Did you know that students spend 80% of their waking hours outside of school? They do, and currently, upper-income parents spend nine times the amount of money on after-school activities than lower-income parents. What does that mean for that second group of students? Our societal structure is built on a network of systems that perpetuate inequitable outcomes. A key failure in this network is the structure of our education system, especially the lack of extended learning programs in disenfranchised communities. This leads to large gaps in graduation and dropout rates, where Black and Brown youth suffer as a result of a lack of opportunities within their communities for quality, extended-learning experiences.
Change The Tune works to close the opportunity gap for youth in underserved communities through creating holistic, radical, and transformational learning experiences in partnership with communal organizations. We have three key strategies to support our work:
Developing innovative revolutionary learning models:
Our models include a multidisciplinary, culturally responsive curriculum and programming focused on cultivating 21st Century and Social-Emotional skills. This curriculum includes innovative, interdisciplinary, project-based learning experiences that students love.
Building Organizational Capacity: We provide hands-on, holistic, organization and facilitator-development training focused on providing soft and hard skills to support the curation of innovative learning models. We also create learning experiences for school leaders to develop their own extended learning programs that are intentionally and equitably designed to build successful community leaders. In addition, Change The tune builds partnerships and programming with local schools, businesses, and community leaders to expand student learning experiences beyond the traditional school day.
Community Mobilization for Extended Learning Funding + New Learning Models: We also partner with foundations, corporations, public officials, and community organizations to bring awareness to the egregious challenges facing the education space. We work with our community village to shift what is possible for learners and create new funding models to support the development of the extended learning space.
To date we have raised over $200,000 and served more than 600 students. Our latest program, launched summer 2021, was a hybrid, summer-learning camp called The Studio. The Studio is a creative, experiential, collaborative four-week program organized for student and teacher development. Students create social-justice business models, learn graphic design, develop personal identities, and participate in fun activities that cultivate skills necessary for stronger academic, life, and leadership development. Teachers are immersed in innovative, out-of-the-box, collaborative experiences that expose them to culturally responsive, project-based, social-emotional learning pedagogy. This is all done in a “lower-stakes” container of summer learning, which supports both professional and personal growth. Upon completion of our program, our teachers and students possess the self-efficacy, social cognition, and 21st-century leadership skills needed for individual success and to positively transform our global community.
