The Yleana Leadership Academy is seeking a Program Leader for its residential summer academy. We take pride in serving rising high school seniors from underserved urban areas as part of our mission to close the achievement gap through a three-week transformative summer SAT experience on a college campus. We are part college experience, part summer camp, part intense SAT training, and part leadership academy.
Our students are all low-income, and the majority are first generation students of color. All of our students attend on full scholarship and describe Yleana as one of the most transformative experiences they have had - they return to their schools with a renewed dedication to their education, and the real sense that they can succeed in whatever they choose to do in life.
Yleana at its best is made up of people who are constantly generating new and better ways to do things, drawing on what they have seen, read, and experienced, who replace “I can’t do that” with “Let’s make it happen." We prefer instructors who can improvise, who are creative, who approach problems in unexpected ways, and who generally understand how to communicate the test to diverse groups of students.
Working at Yleana is a wonderful experience. In 2017, our average score improvement in a 3-week period was 160-180 points on the SAT, and we want your help to make that number even higher.
What you'll be doing:
This position is vital to the cohesion of the campers and staff. You will be in charge of all the fun events that make Yleana a true summer camp. If you are passionate about nonprofit management, youth programming and development, camp management, or event planning/management more generally, this may be your dream job.
Camp runs from Saturday 6/16/18 to Monday 8/13/18; Program Leader interns have to be available for that whole window of time.
We want to hear from you if you:
The Yleana Leadership Academy, the flagship program of the Yleana Leadership Foundation, is a residential summer academy which serves rising high school seniors in urban areas (Baltimore, Boston/North Shore of MA, NYC, and Philadelphia) and seeks to close the achievement gap through a three-week transformative intervention summer SAT experience on a college campus. We are part college experience, part summer camp, part intense SAT training, and part leadership academy. In addition to SAT classes, students explore issues like race, class, and gender through our Issues curriculum, an open-forum discussion setting where they question these issues through readings by people like James Baldwin, Junot Diaz, bell hooks, and Sherman Alexie. We also help our students develop higher order/critical thinking skills through our Entrepreneurship class, which culminates in a one-day startup fair with entrepreneurs from all over the world advising the students all day until their crowning faceoff - a Shark Tank competition.
Yleana campers are typically low-SES, of color, and first-generation college students; all attend on full scholarship. Besides studying for the SAT, being part of Issues and Entrepreneurship classes, campers enjoy a traditional summer camp experience (complete with campfires and S’mores!) while becoming a part of a welcoming and introspective camp community. One of the greatest compliments we have received came from a student who had been in foster care and had faced significant obstacles at home who told us that Yleana was the first place she felt safe, where people truly cared about her.
In 2017, our average score improvement in a 3-week period was 160-180 points on the SAT.