The Elfenworks Foundation is proud to partner with the Lasallian Volunteers of America, The San Damiano Foundation, and Campus Moviefest on the LVSRide film, premiering in 2012.

Our process design with LVSRide

Putting the power of film at the service of the poor…

This project was a win-win project for all participants: Campus Moviefest and the filmmaker are happy, because it was involvement in Campus Moviefest that led to this professional opportunity for a young filmmaker.   The San Damiano Foundation is happy, because the film is in keeping with their motto “putting the power of film at the service of the poor.”  We’re happy, because this project proves the power that student filmmakers can have, making a real difference in the world of social justice.

Whatever your winter celebration, we wish you peace and joy!

We mean it when we say ‘help one, help many, cause a ripple.’ By helping one child, you just can’t predict in what interconnected way you’re changing the future of the entire world… just as a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world can change the weather in another, helping one child can change how the world unfolds in ways we cannot know. That’s been called the ‘butterfly effect.’

Our process design with The Butterfly Project

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1. Hammerfald, K., C. Eberle, M. Grau, A. Kinsperger, A. Zimmermann, U. Ehlert, and J. Gaab. “Persistent effects of cognitive-behavioral stress management on cortisol responses to acute stress in health subjects – A randomized controlled trial.” Psychoneuroendrocrinology 33 (2006): 333-39.
2. Dimsdale, Joel E., Paul Mills, Thomas Patterson, Michael Ziegler, and Elaine Dillon. “Effects of Chronic Stress on Beta-Edrenergic Receptors in the Homeless.” Psychosomatic Medicine 56 (1994): 290-95.
3. Hammerfald, K., C. Eberle, M. Grau, A. Kinsperger, A. Zimmermann, U. Ehlert, and J. Gaab. “Persistent effects of cognitive-behavioral stress management on cortisol responses to acute stress in health subjects – A randomized controlled trial.” Psychoneuroendrocrinology 33 (2006): 333-39.
4. Ranjit, Nalini, Elizabeth A. Young, and George A. Kaplan. “Material hardship alters the diurnal rhythm of salivary cortisol.” International Journal of Epidemiology 34 (2005): 1138-143.
5. Newcomer, John W., Gregg Selke, Angela K. Melson, Tamara Hershey, Suzanne Craft, Katherine Richards, and Amy L. Alderson. “Decreased Memory Performance in Healthy Humans Induced by Stress-Level Cortisol Treatment.” ARCH GEN PSYCHIATRY 56 (1999): 527-33.
6. MacLean, Christopher R.K., Kenneth G. Walton, Stig R. Wenneberg, Debra K. Levitsky, Joseph P. Mandarino, Rafiq Waziri, Stephen L. Hillis, and Robert H. Schneider. “Effects of the transcendental meditation program on adaptive mechanisms: Changes in hormone levels and responses to stress after 4 months of practice.” Psychoneuroendrocrinology 22 (1997): 277-95.

PLEASE NOTE: if you are a shelter volunteer, it’s important for you to check with your the shelter director before enthusiastically jumping in… with proper permissions and training, you avoid unintended problems in areas that are intending to bring only help and healing.  Please let us know your results, and how we can make this a more helpful page!

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Founder and CEO, Admission Possible

St. Paul, Minnesota
2011 In Harmony with Hope® Award winner
[Press Release IHH 2011] [About IHH Award] [Live Streaming]

As a kid growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, Jim McCorkell set up a lawn-mowing business, going door to door and politely stating that he would “be happy to take on your lawn this summer.” Showing an early appreciation for enterprise, he promptly sub-contracted out all the manual labor. McCorkell has applied that same enterprising spirit to his remarkable nonprofit venture called Admission Possible. Just over 10 years ago, McCorkell established a college prep program for low-income youth and was the first in the nation to use the enthusiastic and idealistic labor pool of recent college graduates serving as AmeriCorps to provide the highly personalized support needed to ensure the program’s success. The results are dramatic. Ninety-eight percent of Admission Possible’s students earn admission to college; and nearly 80% of enrollees have earned their four-year degrees or are on the path to do so.

McCorkell’s abiding mission is to make a post-secondary education a reality for the 200,000 at-risk kids each year who graduate high school prepared for college but who, thanks to cultural and functional barriers, aren’t able to get there. The need is real: college participation rates in low-income families are 32% lower than those of wealthy families. That gap remains virtually unchanged since 1970, not long after President Johnson announced the war on poverty—and is symptomatic of our country’s continued, indeed, growing inequality.

McCorkell knows of what he speaks, as he was one of those kids. Neither of McCorkell’s parents finished high school, though they did later earn their G.E.D.’s, and he grew up poor. But he was lucky. His family was stable and his parents supported and encouraged the pursuit of higher education. Additionally a few key teachers and friends recognized his enormous potential and gave him the support he needed to achieve his college goal. McCorkell earned a scholarship to Carleton College before going on to get master’s degrees, first in political science at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and then in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He earned extra money during those student years as a tutor for the test preparation company Kaplan, giving him experience that would prove valuable in subsequent years.

McCorkell entered Harvard intent on studying the interplay of poverty, race and gender, specifically as it related to housing, and with the goal of starting a nonprofit after getting his degree. As he dug deeper and deeper, he became convinced that education was the fundamental piece of the puzzle. With education comes a greater degree of economic security, health improves, and housing becomes more stable. He started to wonder, what if the kind of fee-based test preparation Kaplan students received could be geared towards low-income students? The seed was planted, and it began to germinate during his year-long stint with the national service organization City Year.

In 2000 McCorkell returned to Minnesota, and filed for 501(c)3 status for the nonprofit he always knew he’d start. In this new organization, he married his enterprising spirit with his call to serve the greater good. Naming his new venture Admission Possible, its mission is to make a college education a possibility for low-income students, like himself. The organization uses AmeriCorps members to serve as coaches to students; McCorkell was the first person in the country to leverage the AmeriCorps service infrastructure for college access, and it is essential to the model’s success. Admission Possible is able to provide intensive intervention and a strong mentor relationship—the two elements that are fundamental for success in this space, according to research—for students in the program, and to do it in a way that is affordable. It costs only $3,000 for a student’s two years in the high school program. That is one-seventh the cost of similar federally funded programs. An independent social return on investment study conducted in 2005 estimated that Admission Possible offers a 500% return on investment to society through higher contributions to the tax base and a reduction in rates of incarceration and utilization of costly social services.

Everybody wins. Through Admission Possible, low-income students are given the social support and the educational tools they need to effectively compete for admission to colleges and universities. The universities also benefit: Admission Possible provides them with an effective mechanism for identifying and recruiting a more racially and socioeconomically diverse student population. And with an increasingly competitive global economy, the United States—with a 300,000-person annual shortage in post-secondary educated workers through 2018 —benefits by having a more highly educated workforce. Finally, through its relationship with AmeriCorps, the program incubates hundreds of passionate, committed young changemakers who will take the skills from this first role and apply them throughout their careers. “I couldn’t have imagined a first position to have out of college that could be any better than this. It has blown things wide open in terms of what I can do in the future as I pursue my interest in education,” said D.J. Erickson a first-year Corps member who’s coaching juniors at the Twin Cities’ St. Louis Park High School.

Juniors and seniors who have been admitted into the program meet twice a week for two hours after school with their coach. Each group is comprised of 10-15 kids, who find in each other, kindred spirits. Over the two years they work together, a deep bond is forged—both between the students and between the students and their coach. The coaches serve Monday through Thursday at their assigned high school. There they coach up to 40 students each. On Fridays, the students don’t meet but the coaches do, back at the Admission Possible office to take part in a weekly assessment and ongoing training.

Coaches use Admission Possible’s copyrighted curriculum, created to engage the students and guide them through the two-year access program. On average, each student will spend 320 hours in Admission Possible’s program. The students and their coaches work first on test preparation, to improve student ACT/SAT scores. Most students take part in summer enrichment programs, which their coaches help them find. Next the coaches introduce the students to college life by taking them to visit a number of nearby campuses. They help their students work on their applications, including all requests for financial aid and scholarships. Finally, Admission Possible ensures that the transition to college is successful by fully preparing students. Upon completion of the high school program, students join Admission Possible’s college program where they continue to be supported by a college coach supporting students using a technology-based toolkit of supports.

Infusing everything they do at Admission Possible is a culture of positive idealism—so important to the organization that its central tenets are spelled out on their Web site (among them: strive to be delightful, challenge cynicism, be grateful, have fun…). It works: the Princeton Review recently named Admission Possible one of the best entry level job offerings in the country. The staff culture makes its way through the coaches to the students who, energized by being surrounded and supported by other college-bound students and strong adult mentors for perhaps the first time in their lives, are eager to spread the program’s gospel. They happily do community service and practice tests on weekends and they share their enthusiasm with freshmen and sophomores through formal college planning workshops at their schools.

Always striving for perfection, McCorkell has inculcated a results-focused agenda at Admission Possible: he uses data and feedback to review every aspect of his program, tweaking a little here, a little there…would it make a difference to take the ACT test on a different date, for instance. Real-time intervention is possible thanks to a web-based tracking system that monitors student outcomes. That data is analyzed every Friday by the staff to make sure everyone and everything is on track. Larger studies of the overall effectiveness of the program have also been conducted by outside groups. Most recently a 2011 Harvard historical analysis demonstrated Admission Possible students were 140% more likely to attend a four-year college and 75% more likely to attend any form of post-secondary than their similar peers.  Earlier evaluations like that in 2010 by ICF International released these findings: Admission Possible students raised their ACT scores by an impressive 22% and college acceptance rates were actually 99%. Another external evaluation is taking place now: a Harvard University researcher is undertaking a two-year randomized, controlled study of the program.

Eleven years after the first group of 35 students, Admission Possible has helped 15,000 students through their programs—taking that first, crucial step out of poverty. Each year, Admission Possible enriches the lives of 7,400 low-income students. In 2010-11, there were 1,650 juniors and seniors enrolled in its core high school program; 3,000 freshmen and sophomores took its college information seminars; and 2,750 program graduates took advantage of its college programming. In a short time, Admission Possible has made its impact felt; it is so successful that there are 15 schools currently on the wait list in the Twin Cities area alone. More than 500 recent college graduates applied for the 100 AmeriCorps and VISTA spots that Admission Possible needs to fill next year. Natalie Rule Burns, the organization’s Director of External Relations, said, “The rate of our replication is limited only by funding.”

The Admission Possible model undeniably works—better than any other college readiness program—and it is replicable and scalable. Additionally, McCorkell has molded an efficient, effective model that works equally well in his absence. For these reasons, the Admission Possible board voted to start a careful national expansion, first with an expansion pilot launch to Milwaukee in 2008; then with an aggressive national expansion plan launched in 2010 to reach 20,000 low-income students annually in 10 sites by 2015.  Growing at a rate of one to two new markets per year, Admission Possible just announced its third site in Omaha, Nebraska, this summer.

Jim McCorkell may have had the business sense to innovate a model that can do without him but there’s little question that he can’t do without it—this is his life’s work. Every step he has taken has deliberately guided him down the path to Admission Possible. Rule Burns calls him “impressive and inspiring” but also entirely earnest and up-front: “You’ll never get spun by Jim. He’s doing this with a vision that the future of America’s children should be determined solely by their talent, motivation and effort, not their parents’ socioeconomic status.” It’s just that simple.

Founder & Director, Hope Meadows & Generations of Hope Development Corporation

Rantoul & Champaign, Illinois
2011 In Harmony with Hope® Award winner
[Press Release IHH 2011] [About IHH Award] [Live Streaming]

Everything old is new again—or so the song says. Hope Meadows, the brainchild of Brenda Krause Eheart, PhD, is a new kind of community that has its roots in a lost way of life. Located in Rantoul, Illinois, it is an intentional multi-generational community in which residents come together to help raise the children and support each other through the life cycle.

In the early 1990s, Eheart was the director of the Developmental Child Care Program at the University of Illinois in Champaign. Much of her research had entailed studies of the foster care system in Illinois. The more she studied it, the more she became convinced there must be a better way. Of particular concern to Eheart was the fast tracking Illinois was trying to do, bringing foster care kids into adoption without also providing the families the support they needed to make the transition successful. One day, Eheart sat in court and heard a judge grant a family’s request to undo their recent adoption. The child had left his home that morning for school belonging in a family; he was going to be picked up by state workers and told he was going to a foster home. Looking at the court records, Eheart realized this child shared a birthday with her own daughter. The coincidence struck a nerve: Eheart (who’s been described as “all vision and determination”) resolved to develop a completely different way of caring for our vulnerable kids.

The timing for Eheart’s epiphany was fortuitous, as a perfect storm was brewing. The Illinois Child Welfare System was reeling from the addition of more than 1,000 new children into the foster care system each month and staff turnover was high.[1] At about the same time, the US military was restructuring and bases across the country were being closed. When Eheart heard that the Chanute Air Force base near her, in Rantoul, was one of those slated for closure, she had the audacious idea that sections of the former base could be used as neighborhood in which 15 foster families could live together (with the goal of adopting all of the foster children) and receive supportive services from the other adoptive parents in the community and from an on-site staff.

She successfully lobbied the state, thanks in part to the disarray at the Department of Child and Family Services, to award her $1,000,000 to put her plan into action. She also negotiated a waiver to have her newly established nonprofit, then called Hope for the Children, administer flat stipends to adoptive families rather than the more typical payments calculated per-child-per-day. The waiver was an important component of her effort to minimize the differences between foster/adoptive kids and other families in the surrounding neighborhood.

The Defense Department was much tougher for her to navigate as they weren’t accustomed to creative solutions and purchase offers from non-profit institutions. Negotiations were stalled for years until Eheart requested a presidential inquiry into the matter. Eight days later, the homes were hers for but a portion of the $1 million she’d been granted by the state—but there was a new problem. She had to purchase an 83-unit block of the base, not just the 15 homes she wanted.

Mulling over this new dilemma, Eheart had her second epiphany with respect to Hope Meadows. Remembering something she’d once heard Gray Panthers leader Maggie Kuhn say, Eheart lit upon the idea of providing seniors with housing at below-market rates. In exchange, the seniors would be asked to volunteer with the Hope Meadows community. Nearly 20 years later, the concept of multi-generational living in community is the simple strength of the Hope Meadows model.

Today at Hope Meadows, 9-12 families live in four- to six-bedroom homes, free of rent, on the former base.  In exchange, they agree to adopt at least three or four foster care system children who have slim chances of finding permanent homes. One parent in each household is hired by Hope Meadows as a staff member and paid a salary, benefits and retirement—as opposed to receiving direct payments for food and housing from DCFS. “We didn’t want the kids to be commodities,” explains Dr. Martha Power, senior fellow with the Generations of Hope Development Corporation. That parent is also required to be a stay-at-home parent.

The 50 or so seniors (many of whom have traveled from across the country to retire and live out their days at Hope Meadows) volunteer at least six hours a week to tutor the kids, help the families, or help in the running of the community. During an average week Hope Meadows’ seniors contribute 274 hours of volunteer services (valued at $3 million) to the community. To help ease the end-of-life transition for the seniors who come to Hope Meadows to stay, Hope House, a supportive, community-assisted living environment for the frailest of the seniors, will open this fall in Hope Meadows.

Because the guiding principles of Hope Meadows encourage community members to become problem solvers rather than recipients of service, there is no need for a large staff overseeing the operation. According to Elaine Gehrmann, Hope Meadows’ director, there are four staff members in addition to her: a case worker, a case work supervisor, an office manager and a maintenance man. Two part-time therapists round out the staff.

The rich community life at Hope Meadows is replete with traditional programs and services (therapy, case management, tutoring, after-school programs) and less traditional programs and services, like camps, picnics, special neighborhood events, and having caring “grandparents” nearby. The Intergenerational Center—the cultural, social, and education hub of the neighborhood—has computer rooms, a library stocked with parenting materials, and a multi-purpose room in which weekly senior coffees, potlucks and parties are held and more than 400 educational programs have taken place in the past 10 years.

The families and seniors migrating to Rantoul, Illinois, to live in this special community are testament to the success of Eheart’s model. That success is further demonstrated more concretely in Hope Meadows’ permanency rate, which is 89%–compared with a 56% average permanency rate among comparable kids in Illinois over the past two decades (the permanency rate reflects the long-term stability of a child-care placement through adoption or permanent reassignment into the birth home, as opposed to staying in the foster care program and being shuffled from home to home). Seventy-two percent of the families moving into Hope Meadows would not have adopted their foster children were it not for the Hope Meadows system of support. Additionally, 100% of the children who have made Hope Meadows their home have received their high school diploma or are on track to do so. (It bears repeating that these are children who were among the hardest to place when they joined a family at Hope Meadows. It is estimated that keeping a child in high school through graduation saves the state $300,000–$500,000.[2]) In another strong indicator for the value of Hope Meadow’s model, 100% of parents feel their kids are safe in the Hope neighborhood.

Hope Meadows has developed an economically viable model. Rental income from the seniors makes up a reliable and steady income stream. State and federal funding fluctuates. When families first move to Hope Meadows and take in foster children, income comes to Hope Meadows from the DCFS payments for the children in foster care. When the children are adopted, federal and state subsidies (paid to families of children with special needs) increase and help counter the loss of the foster care financing. Earned income from investments and traditional fundraising also contribute to the budget bottom line.

In 2006, a little more than 10 years after Hope Meadows was formed, Eheart founded the Generations of Hope Development Corporation (GHDC) to oversee the replication of the Hope Meadows concept—called the Generations of Hope Community (GHC). A small group of half a dozen researchers work with Eheart to analyze existing programs and create working guidelines for the dozens of communities across the country that are interested in creating contiguous neighborhoods of intergenerational living like the one modeled at Hope Meadows.

Each community’s needs are unique, and each state and municipality has its own rules regarding real estate development and building codes—creating the need for an adaptable model for replication. At the most basic level all GHC-inspired neighborhoods share the following characteristics:

• Seniors as volunteers
• Geographically contiguous neighborhood
• Organized around a social challenge
• Three generations live together in community

There are currently four programs inspired by the example of Hope Meadows in operation across the country, with another six in active development and dozens more in the planning stages. GHDC does not fund any of these new sites but serves to facilitate their creation with advice and guidance on site development, program development strategies, core community outcomes and ongoing research and analysis.

Generations of Hope communities have created a model where the community itself is the intervention rather than the more common model of intervention in community. This kind of intergenerational community living has transformative power. More than two-thirds of the Hope Meadows seniors responded in a recent survey that their health had been positively impacted by their move to Hope Meadows. Creating that sense of purpose in retirement is just one of the GHC model’s transformative abilities. “This is something that just means so much to us,” remarks David Netterfield, a senior living at Hope Meadows with his wife, Carol. “We just love telling people about it. As we say, it’s not quite heaven. It’s Hope.” His voice oozes emotion when he recalls one of his frequent visits to Hope Meadows before making the final decision to move there, “One of the teens came home from school and saw us there AGAIN. He came right up to me and said, ‘Will you please move here so you can be my grandparents?’” Indeed, they did become close when the Netterfields moved to Hope Meadows in 2008.

Program design that is responsive and evolves as new situations develop is a basic principle of Generations of Hope. As first conceived by Eheart, Hope Meadows was initially meant to be a supportive community for foster parents interested in moving to adoption. Quickly, it became a multi-generational neighborhood organized around the kids. More than 15 years later, new GHC neighborhoods are often advertised as retirement communities with a purpose—service to vulnerable populations. Those populations can be hard-to-place foster children, but they might also be kids exiting foster care or the juvenile system, parents re-entering society from prison or drug treatment programs, isolated single-parent families, homeless families and individuals, or military families facing instability.

Regardless of the social challenge that brings a community together it is a common and shared sense of purpose that weaves it together. A sense of connection and embeddedness and the development of meaningful relationships turn out to be some of our best societal problem solvers, as evidenced by the first GHC community, Hope Meadows.

Affectionately called a “burning furnace of good intention” by Gehrmann, Eheart’s impassioned vision for a better future for our country’s vulnerable children is proving that was is old is new again: it really does take a village to raise a child.

Founder, Communities In Schools

Arlington, Virginia
2011 In Harmony with Hope® Award winner
[Press Release IHH 2011] [About IHH Award] [Live Streaming]

Failure—that’s what 17-year-old Bill Milliken understood best.  He didn’t know how to succeed in a school system that continually reinforced the notion that he was dumb. So, he found himself spending his days on the streets of Pittsburgh, perfecting his skill of “hanging out” and fulfilling the low expectations everyone had of him. When you’re at loose ends, you either hurt other people or you hurt yourself—that’s one of Milliken’s beliefs. He was intent on the latter.

A favorite hangout of his was the local pool hall—and that’s where a young man who would become his mentor found Milliken and his friends. And, because of him, Milliken’s life was forever changed: He “came in into my neighborhood and walked through the valley of the shadow of adolescence with me and loved me into change,” Milliken said recently when he accepted the Jefferson Award.

It was the 1960s and Milliken and his friend, Vinny, who also found his life on this new path, decided to give themselves back to the streets. Vinny, though, had to first turn himself in and spend hard time in prison before he could emerge on the other side. Milliken used those years to finish high school and complete “three freshman years of college,” as he’s fond of saying.

As soon as Vinny got out of prison, they headed to Harlem, where “we spent 11 years, learning life.” They were intent on reaching disenfranchised kids—kids just like they’d been a few years earlier. They specialized in hanging out and befriended the homeless and addicted youth on the streets who had nobody else. Within a few years, Milliken and Vinny were living with and helping 25-30 kids at a time and “learning a lot about community.” They also buried 18 of their friends. It takes a lot to turn around expectations.

Milliken’s fiery idealism and passion fueled his speaking career. Without realizing he had a gift, he was being asked to speak around the country. At the same time, mainstream educational institutions kept him at arm’s length—so Milliken and his crew started their own school, initially calling it the Liberation School. They found students but discovered it was next to impossible to raise funds to run the school. Then, in a stroke of marketing genius, they changed the school’s name when they realized the wealthy sent their kids to institutions that, more often than not, included the word “academy.” So they renamed their school the Street Academy—and the corporate funds started flowing. In short order, they had 18 street academies operating around New York City, and kids and young adults who’d dropped out of high school were now making it through college.

By 1977, Milliken and his colleagues had mellowed enough to take their success with the street academies and apply their approach within the school systems. They had learned that they didn’t need to replicate programs, but instead make use of existing community services. And most importantly, they recognized that programs don’t change lives—relationships do.  By bringing the panoply of services into the public school building and providing a mentor/advisor to ease kids along their journey, they were able to successfully help underserved kids and their families negotiate the confusing array of services.

They called the effort Cities In Schools (CIS, later changing the name to Communities In Schools) and, in short order they were serving 3,000 students in Atlanta, Indianapolis, and New York. Their successful model has been endorsed by every presidential administration since its first proponent President Jimmy Carter.

Today, CIS helps 1.3 million children in more than 3,400 schools every year through 200 local affiliates in 25 states and the District of Columbia. More than 50,000 volunteers serve as mentors and tutors for the program.

CIS is a unique community model that forms partnerships between schools, families, and community leaders to build a solid support system for students. CIS works with administrators and teachers of each participating public school to identify the most critical needs of their students. CIS then determines which community services will best meet those needs and brings in the necessary volunteers and agencies. The CIS local affiliate staff ensure a customized program that will be effective within each individual school. They also work to secure the support of local government, nonprofit organizations, service providers, businesses, and volunteer groups.

On the other side of the partnership, parents must approve and support their child’s participation in CIS and volunteer their time. The kids themselves must show the same commitment to stay in the program.  This mutual buy-in has the added dividend of serving to create new family bonds.

Mentoring and tutoring services are offered at 90% of CIS affiliates, and 73% provide after- or before-school programs. In keeping with its holistic approach, CIS affiliates may bring in health professionals, college, career and/or drug-education counselors, parenting coaches for the extended family—or whatever particular services the students at each individual school need.

By bringing together all of the different services under one school roof, CIS helps make participating schools vital centers for the broader community. Milliken likens the fragmented system of social service delivery that exists before CIS brings it all together to trying to type a letter with 26 typewriters that each have only one letter key.

The numbers are impressive: nearly 80% of CIS-tracked kids improve attendance and academic performance—and end up graduating. These numbers are all the more admirable given national statistics Milliken recited in 2009: 1/3 of all kids fail to graduate with their class; ½ of those are minorities; and ½ of all inmates are high school dropouts.

At the core of CIS philosophy are five basic tenets. Every child needs and deserves:

1. A one-on-one relationship with a caring adult
2. A safe place to learn and grow
3. A healthy start and a healthy future
4. A marketable skill to use upon graduation
5. A chance to give back to peers and community

A committed, caring and large team of volunteers helps ensure that this collaborative strategy works, and they allow for the one-on-one relationships that are so essential to a child’s success.  They also help free up teachers to teach and allow students to focus on learning. More than 50,000 volunteers serve as role models, mentors and tutors. In all, they contribute nearly 3 million hours of service, which allows CIS to deliver their valuable services for an annual cost lower than $200 per student.

Milliken would be the first to say that all five tenets grow out of the first. Without a strong, personal relationship with someone who encourages an at-risk student along the way, the program is doomed to failure. From the beginning, it’s been about people. Speaking of his move to Harlem 40 years ago, Milliken says, “I didn’t go there to start a program. I went there to love my neighbor.”

But, if those relationships form the core of CIS, there is also an effective program model in place. The national office provides training, support and a basic model for the independently incorporated local affiliates to adopt and adapt as they see fit. Each community’s individual model varies, depending on the needs and strengths of the particular community. The result is a highly effective, low-cost program that has turned around hundreds of thousands of lives.

Bill Milliken is the author of three books:  So Long, Sweet Jesus; Tough Love; and The Last Dropout. His newest book, From the Rear-View Mirror, is due out in Fall 2011.