Sway Magazine: Success Beyond Limits Offers Youth Essential Academic Tools
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Tags: academic, beyond, essential, finch, jane, limits, Patrick, Ryan, sbl, success, sway, tools, westview, youth
on July 8, 2011 at 11:00 am
By Ryan B. Patrick
What can education inspire? It’s a question that resonates in the face of a disturbing 40 per cent dropout rate among Toronto’s Black teens. Within the much-stigmatized Jane and Finch community, the Success Beyond Limits (SBL) program functions as an oasis of hope.
Founded in 2010, but using a model developed in 2006, SBL is designed to assist students in the catchment area of Westview Centennial Secondary. With the motto “Empowered to Empower”, the alternative program offers summer programs, peer tutoring and mentoring, after-school study sessions and co-op opportunities to local community youth.
In particular, SBL coordinates a six-week summer program for Grade 8 students from neighbouring Brookview Middle School and Oakdale Park Middle School who will be entering Grade 9 in the fall.
According to SBL executive director Chris Penrose, the community-based initiative aims to offer an effective approach for supporting the transition between elementary and secondary school for Jane and Finch youth. Meanwhile, for program manager Kaneka Watkins, SBL is all about giving youth the tools for academic success. Watkins is from the area and has a clear understanding of the community’s needs, which include common ground between youth and authority figures.
“We are an organization that is youth-led,” says Watkins, adding that former program participants can come back to function as mentors and tutors for the next generation. All of SBL’s staff members and volunteers are either from or have close ties to the area.
SBL has also cultivated partnerships with institutions and community organizations such as the Toronto District School Board, Black Creek Community Health Centre, Humber College and York University. This ensures that the program can continue throughout the school year, with SBL staff becoming a regular fixture at Westview and conducting after-school activities.
But it hasn’t been easy, admits Penrose. As a not-for-profit, there are inherent challenges around staffing, resources, budgetary concerns, and attempting to develop an alternative approach to education, mirroring the same organizational challenges facing the Toronto District School Board. The program briefly went on hiatus in 2010, but overwhelming response for a community-based educational model revived SBL into its current incarnation.
“There was a response from the community to continue the program,” says Penrose, which helped to validate the SBL mission. But it’s not just the community that benefits. “I love the work I’m doing,” says Watkins. “I love the interaction with the youth. I understand what they’re going through, having been through it not that long ago. We’re in an area that gets stigmatized a lot and is seen in a negative way, but I see a different side. I see the joy and I learn a lot from them, too. It’s something that benefits both sides.”
Thus far, more than 500 students have benefited from the program’s existence.
http://swaymag.ca/people-community/success-beyond-limits-offers-youth-essential-academic-tools/
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