Head Start is a nationally recognized early childhood program that supports the whole child and whole family. This grant reflects a powerful expansion of our mission and impact. In alignment with our commitment to the long-term continuum of care, we will now be able to serve families with our youngest DREAM students — providing access to high-quality early learning and care from the very beginning of a child’s life and educational journey.

Beyond academics, the program includes health screenings and medical referrals, nutritious breakfast and lunch daily, social-emotional learning and mental health support, and connections to community services families may need. In addition, partnership with families and caregivers is built into the program through dedicated family advocates.

This approach aligns with DREAM’s core belief: when we invest in children early and support families deeply, we build stronger foundations for long-term success. 

The data from our own schools show a consistent pattern. Students who start at DREAM in Kindergarten achieve at significantly higher levels than those who join us in later grades. The difference isn’t small. Early childhood is when children develop the building blocks for reading, mathematical thinking, self-regulation, and social skills. Starting even earlier gives educators the opportunity to nurture these critical abilities before formal schooling begins, catch and address developmental concerns sooner, and build trusting relationships with families from day one.

We are deeply grateful for this opportunity that brings us closer to realizing our vision for cradle-to-career success. We look forward to welcoming our littlest DREAMers and their families into our community this year.

If you’re interested in enrolling into our early childhood programs, please fill out this interest form.
For more information on the program, contact us at enrollment@wearedream.org.
To learn about open roles, email us at talent-team@wearedream.org. 

The post DREAM receives $28 million in Head Start grant appeared first on DREAM.

The group of then-seniors who showed for the RIT information session—Deon Jeffrey, Emanuel Binett, Jaden Bright, Kelvin Arredondo, Mamadou Ndiaye, Nasir West, Zakaria Sakhi, Abdul Tariq Macauley, and Victor Sanchez—were starting their college application processes, and wanted to learn more about what the upstate school had to offer. What no one expected was that the routine information session would spark an opportunity of a lifetime for all of them.

“I’ve never been in a room with high school students who had such dignity and respect for the process,” said Ian Mortimer, Vice President of Enrollment at RIT. “They were very curious about programs, culture, experience. They were very well prepared in terms of how they’re thinking about their futures—and I was completely blown away.”

Mortimer knew very quickly that he wanted all nine of the DREAM students to attend RIT. But exactly how to make that happen would require reworking and expanding the cohort idea, creating a formal partnership with DREAM, and enlisting resources from the organization’s long-established post-secondary support programming. Between RIT, DREAM, and Truesdale, a plan was created to not only provide financial assistance for each of the nine students, but to also provide them with the academic, social, and personal support they would need to thrive and graduate.

“Both parties were very aligned that the goal of this cohort is college completion,” said Katie Doctor, DREAM’s Managing Director of Educational Strategy & Data. “We wanted to design this program in a way that really maximizes student success.”

In partnering with RIT, supports are enhanced for the nine cohort students, a template that could become part of DREAM’s long-term plans for post-secondary success.

A formal partnership with a college like RIT, which has a co-op structure that emphasizes college completion and job attainment, felt like the natural next step in DREAM’s work to ensure all students can fulfill their vision of success. More than a decade ago, DREAM founded its Legends Fellows program to support former Harlem RBI participants as they embarked on their post-high school pathways. For six years after graduation, this program provides resources like campus visits, care packages, academic assistance, financial aid, career networking, and mentorship to the college-aged students it serves. Since the founding of DREAM Charter High School in 2017, the program now works with school staff to provide support for scholars to and through college, and in the past year, DREAM has piloted “Close the Gap,” a formulaic approach to finding and funding students’ “best fit” college choices.

In partnering with RIT, these supports are enhanced for the nine cohort students, a template that could become part of DREAM’s long-term plans for post-secondary success. Not only will the cohort have dedicated advisors and program coordinators from both the university and the Legends Fellows program, but they will also be attending a summer bridge program—a chance for them to get their feet wet with college coursework and get used to living on campus—and will spend their first year of college in RIT’s School of Individualized Study, where they can use a STEM-focused curriculum to learn more about what they’d like their focus to be. What’s more, each student will receive a full scholarship for each year at RIT, backed by generous funding from RIT, DREAM, and Truesdale.

“To be able to help nine young men get a really cool opportunity, in an environment where you can feel the love and support from DREAM and from RIT, was an outcome I couldn’t have imagined,” said Truesdale.

Just before DCHS’ graduation on June 23, the DREAM and RIT communities came together in East Harlem to celebrate this partnership, and the successes already achieved by the soon-to-be cohort students and their families. Charting a new course for the organization, the students look forward to embarking on the next step in their futures.

“One of the things I try to get them to understand is the importance of the legacy that they’re starting,” said Mo Ferreras, Assistant Director of Admissions at RIT and also a former New York City charter school student. “I want them to leave an imprint on RIT itself. They’re already a team, a community. I want them to come on campus and have people say ‘oh, those are the DREAM students.’”

The post In it Together: DREAM Partners with RIT appeared first on DREAM.

I’ve often said that the best decision that we made in DREAM Charter Schools’ formative year was to hire Eve. I remember thinking, even back in 2009, that Eve was one of the strongest leaders I’d ever met. In the twelve years since we pivoted from Harlem RBI to become the DREAM that we know today, we’ve grown from one DREAM Charter School to five, developed our extended-day and extended-year Grow the Whole Child model, and graduated 100% of our founding DREAM Charter High School students—with Eve at the center of it all. She’s made our organization better, and she’s done it with clarity, grace, and exceptional results, all of which became particularly critical over the past 18 months during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Eve and I have operated as close partners for some time now. So more than anything, this new leadership structure is a move to formalize how we already run the organization today, with added intentionality around how we partner, make decisions, and empower others—DREAM’s next generation of leadership talent—to make decisions in order to maximize our entire team’s effectiveness and potential.

The latter is particularly important to Eve and me, as we acknowledge our position as two white leaders of a majority Black and brown organization. The co-leadership model, similar to the co-teaching model we employ in all of our classrooms, claims no single expert. It is built on the idea of shared power and shared leadership—and these are values that we want to continue to nurture within and across DREAM. Accordingly, we see co-leadership as a strategy and solution for the long-term sustenance of our organization, and not as a step in a succession plan. I’m as committed to DREAM as ever, and I’m excited to partner with Eve for many years in this manner.

DREAM is poised to continue on its growth trajectory, and having the right people and structures—and partners—in place to support that growth is essential. Below, you’ll hear briefly from Eve on what that partnership means to her, and you can expect much more from us in the coming months about what else is in the works here at DREAM. For now, thank you for your ongoing friendship as we work together to ensure transformative outcomes for our youth.

A Word from Eve

First, I want to send my profound thanks to everyone who has brought our organization to this moment. That includes Rich – though he will deny it, he is an integral part of what DREAM means to so many people, and there’s no one else I’d rather do this work alongside.

Rich and I are both keenly aware that no leader can do their job without the support of their community, and in our decades at DREAM, we have both received that support in abundance – from our families, from our staff, from our Legends, and from you, our partners and supporters. DREAM’s persistence through the pandemic, and our ability to now position the organization for continued growth, is the result of the countless community members over thirty years who have believed in and worked tirelessly toward realizing DREAM’s most core values. Today and every day, I am humbled to be able to do this work.

I also want to echo Rich’s words about DREAM’s co-leadership model – the idea that each and every person who works here at DREAM is a leader in their own right, and has the power and ability to nurture leadership in our young people. Rich and I are only a small part of what makes this place tick; we know that we are here to serve, and to listen. As ever, our doors are open.

The post An exciting DREAM leadership announcement appeared first on DREAM.

DREAM was born on an East Harlem ballfield in the summer of 1991. Ever since, the meaning of summer—of freedom, joy, and infinite possibilities—has always been core to our foundation. This summer, of course, we had to get creative and work a little harder to bring that spirit to life, but fortunately, a little ingenuity (and a lot of planning) is nothing new for our DREAM Team or our families. Because of the strength of the relationships that undergird all of our work at DREAM, we delivered our award-winning summer learning programming to over 600 youth, from preschool to pre-college, from East Harlem to the South Bronx.

Our kids logged on each day for workouts and games, reading activities, virtual field trips, and more. That includes the 150+ high school scholars who took on internships and summer jobs as coaches and mentors, leading remote activities for our little ones—for many of them, representing their first paid work-based experience. We also offered opt-in, small-group play on our Field of Dreams, featuring safe and socially distanced pods that allowed our students to enjoy more traditional summer moments, too.

There’s no one better to tell you about DREAM’s summer than the team responsible for ensuring our sports-based program made a successful pivot to virtual. Hear straight from our Managing Director of Programs Kalila Hoggard and Chief Education Officer Eve Colavito in this recent video segment from Education Week.

Building relationship-based learning spaces will be more important than ever heading into the fall, and DREAM is fortunate to have long-standing practices to lean on, as highlighted recently in this piece by the Charter School Growth Fund. Expect to hear more from us on this front in the coming weeks as we launch the school year.

As always, we are grateful for the support that made it possible for our students to have a uniquely impactful summer—and it’s that same support that will help sustain us as we tackle back-to-school and beyond. As we recently told The Chronicle of Philanthropy, our supporters haven’t simply carried DREAM through these and other difficult times; they’re helping us, every day, to emerge stronger.

It’s that partnership—our families, our team, and our supporters—that makes it particularly meaningful to be recognized this year as semifinalists for the 2020 Nonprofit Excellence Awards. (And we’re in great company!) As we continue to navigate new terrain together, apart but united, we’re surrounded by proof that dreaming big pays off.

The post In the News: A Virtual DREAM Summer appeared first on DREAM.