SCO Receives Young Men’s Initiative (YMI) Award to Support Peer Tutoring Program

SCO Family of Services has been awarded a $20,000 grant from the New York City’s Young Men’s Initiative (YMI) that will be used to provide mentoring, academic tutoring, and social-emotional support to youth in foster care. This grant comes through a partnership between YMI and NYC’s Neighborhood Opportunity Networks (NeON) intended to support our city’s youth as they continue to navigate through a challenging school year.

In SCO’s Peer Tutoring Program, foster care youth who are high school seniors or in college will be paid to provide online tutoring to 30 foster youth in grades 3-12 (ages 7-18). Each student will receive up to 2 hours per week of tutoring for 10 weeks and a $100 cash incentive/gift card for participating in the program. SCO will target communities/schools in Brownsville, Bedford Stuyvesant, East New York, South Bronx, and Southeast Queens, among others.

This program will help address the educational obstacles faced by youth in foster care that can lead to a higher high school drop-out rate and lower secondary education rate than their peers.