Giving Poor Kids a Leg Up in Youth Sports, Recruiting Vets to the Ivy League and More

 
Poor Kids Are Being Priced Out of Youth Sports: Here’s One Solution, Washington Post
Low-income parents often can’t afford to buy their children a $300 baseball bat or $250 hockey skates; they may struggle to scrounge up even the $50 fee to join a youth sports league. In Gaithersburg, Md., an outlying D.C. suburb, officials simplified the fee-waiver process — from an explanation why parents couldn’t afford the entry price to a simple checkbox — and participation shot up by 80 percent in high-poverty schools.
Veterans in the Ivy League: Students Seek to Up Their Ranks, Associated Press
Only three Harvard undergrads served in the military; at Princeton, only one. A new intercollegiate student organization, the Ivy League Veterans Council, is advocating that the elite schools’ administrations should do more to bring former service members into their colleges by recruiting soldiers as if they were athletes, establishing a veterans’ office on campus or accepting transfer credits.
King County Tries Counseling, Self-Reflection Instead of Jail for Teens, The Seattle Times
Which juvenile justice system seems preferable: one where kids leave hardened by disruptive prison sentences or one where teens emerge with a better understanding of themselves and their crimes? In a first attempt at restorative justice, the top juvenile prosecutor in King County, Wash., put one defiant, 15-year-old robber through 108 hours of hearings to see if self-reflection could change his attitude where prison cells had failed.

This Transgender Athlete Is Taking on Bullying, One School at a Time

Kye Allums, a former Division I guard for the George Washington Colonials women’s basketball team, struggled with bullies in high school. Students made fun of Allums, who now identifies as a man, for not being a “normal girl,” and would even knock food out of his hands at lunch. But now Allums is a full-time public speaker, traveling the country to address K-12 schools, colleges and corporations about acceptance and inclusion for transgender people. He sits down with bullies and their victims at schools to help them better understand each other. Once, he even received an email from a student thanking Allums for helping the student realize how his actions affected the classmate he was bullying. “That was one of the best days of my life,” Allums told TakePart. “Nobody deserves to be hurt just because you don’t understand them.” While traveling, Allums is also sharing others’ stories for the organization I Am Enough, which supports people through their transition to another gender. Allums funds all of the expenses for the project out of his own pocket and with a Go Fund Me fundraising page; he hopes it will increase visibility and awareness for the LGBT community. “Anyone can be an advocate: Simply stand up and speak out against injustice. Show anyone who is ignorant and unkind that it’s not OK.”

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Many Olympic Athletes Can’t Afford Their Dreams, So One Woman Stepped Up to Help

Only a few lucky Olympic athletes receive corporate sponsorships. Many elite contenders have barely enough money to feed and house themselves, let alone pay for their training and competitions.

That’s why Emily White, a musician manager for Whitesmith Entertainment, is using her talent development skills to help competitive athletes. White founded Dreamfuel, a crowd-funding platform, to select athletes and launch their fundraising campaigns. After college, athletes are often caught in a dilemma: train full time to work toward their dreams, or work full time to support themselves. White, a former Division I swimmer, realized that most determined athletes would rather struggle than give up. “I was talking to another music exec who had a friend who was an Olympic weightlifter, who was living in her coach’s basement,” White told Fast Company. “I realized this is a thing.”

But Dreamfuel doesn’t just raise money and give it to the athletes; it also helps them market themselves and build a higher profile social media presence to attract potential sponsors in the long run. This is where White’s expertise comes in. She said that musicians, unlike athletes, know they need to get their fans engaged. White said Dreamfuel wants athletes to know how to develop their brands for long-term success. “We put together all the plans, all the benefit tiers, teach them how to create and sell merch, how to market themselves online,” White said. “Basically, all the things I do for bands, I’m flipping to the sports universe.”

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Can Software Close the SAT Achievement Gap?

Dan Driscoll started City Football Club, a nonprofit soccer program for middle and high school students in Washington, DC. To play soccer, students had to participate in SAT tutoring and college counseling. Driscoll found that his tutoring techniques helped his students gain an average of 100 points on each of the three sections of the SAT. And while many of his students were heading to college, he wanted to find a way to give the same opportunity to other students. So he started Prepify, a cloud-based service that teaches students to take the SAT and ACT. The program adapts to students’ progress—for example, if a student misses a question, an easier version of a similar question will pop up next—and could close the gap in test scores between low-income students and their affluent peers. Prepify is a for-profit company, and Driscoll plans to reinvest all profits back into the software to create tools like a progress dashboard to connect low-income students with top universities.
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How Tennis Helps These Boston Students Graduate High School

Tenacity was founded by Ned Eames, a management consultant and tennis pro who wanted to give more opportunities to inner-city students. The organization is built on a unique collaboration between athletics and academics. Tenacity staff work with teachers and school administrators to create individual study plans to help students in reading comprehension, vocabulary, and journaling, while the tennis program gets students active, and teaches them discipline, confidence and social skills. More than 95% of Tenacity students graduate from high school, versus Boston’s average of 70%. Also, 80% of Tenacity students go to college. In the next five years, Tenacity will serve 2,000 students, expand its academic support to math, and partner with schools to create multi-purpose spaces to increase capacity in its tennis instruction.  Sound academics, life skill development, field trips and athletics is clearly a winning combination.