Teach for America Launches Fellowship
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowEducation nonprofit Teach for America Indianapolis is kicking off its inaugural Investing in Innovation Fellowship. The nonprofit raised $30,000 to fund social innovation projects that engage and support students in low-income communities throughout the city. Nine local leaders have been selected for the first cohort thorough a competitive application process. They will attempt to tackle issues that affect underrepresented students, including mental health resources, access to the arts and mentoring services.
In an interview with Inside INdiana Business, Executive Director Amar Patel said while potential for Hoosier children is distributed equally across lines of race and class, opportunity is not.
“There are systemic racial, socioeconomic barriers that cause an opportunity gap in education and multiple other systems that negatively impact thousands of Indianapolis students and families. We’re a leadership development organization and so what we do is we find promising leaders who commit to teach for two years in Indianapolis schools serving predominantly low income students. We support them to be highly effective beginning teachers and also through the experience, cultivate their leadership, the long-term leadership, to make an impact for the rest of their lives, beginning through classroom teaching. And then we want to leverage kind of a growing network to fuel learning and innovation to make collective change.”
The fellowship program is designed to identify and break down the most common barriers low-income and underserved students face. Patel says the applicants selected for the cohort are people that understand these problems and have innovative ideas on how to solve them.
“We launched this fellowship program to stimulate and generate big new ideas immediately from those of our members that are serving most closely and are proximate to students themselves. That are teaching and leading in schools every single day and understand very clearly through day to day experience how much potential and brilliance their students have and also what are the biggest barriers that are immediately in front of them. And then, because we think they’re then, because of that proximity, in the best position to elevate and develop solutions that are highly relevant.”
Starting in the spring, the five-month program will run a series of professional development workshops from local and national organizations that focus on areas such as project management, entrepreneurship and fundraising. Upon completion, the fellows will each receive up to $2,500 to pursue their project.
“This fellowship program is a mechanism to identify those sort of budding innovators, give them access to learning and resources around social innovation, and then invest in their ideas to help them help them scale,” said Patel.
The inaugural cohort includes:
- Leader: Max Glenn, KIPP Indy Unite Elementary
Issue: Arts access - Leader: Elyse McNett Goonan, Envisage Technologies
Issue: Youth philanthropy - Leader: Shivani Goyal, La Plaza
Issue: Mental health resources for immigrants - Leader: Tom Hakim, Washington Woods Elementary School
Issue: Social, emotional and academic growth for highest-need students - Leader: Michael Lipphardt, Victory College Prep
Issue: College and career access - Leader: Ana Luis, The Excel Center
Issue: Preventing high school discontinuation - Leader: Madeline Mason, Metropolitan School District of Washington Township
Issue: Teacher wellness - Leaders: Joe Zwiebel and Makayla Imrie, Thomas Carr Howe High School
Issue: Comprehensive mentoring for under-resourced students
For more information about the fellowship program, click here.
Executive Director of Teach For America Indy Amar Patel tell Inside INdiana Business how Teach for America aims to increase oppertunities for Hoosier children.