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To improve the quality of life for families in low-income and underrepresented communities.
To support, educate, empower, and engage at-risk youth in a holistic manner.
Seeing Today’s Adolescents Reach Success (S.T.A.R.S.) is a community based program established in Chicago, IL in April of 2011. We focus on teaching life skills to students, from the age of 10 years old through college, with an emphasis on independent living. Each student is provided with one-on-one individualized mentorship 10-15 hours per week. In addition to mentorship, students attend various workshops, training sessions, and field trips that provide them the tools they need in order to be successful in their current and future endeavors.
S.T.A.R.S. focuses on spending intentional time with each student by developing a space that is characterized as being empathic, warm, respectful, and responsive. We strive to build an authentic mentor-mentee relationship by providing a positive weekly, reliable routine that is both mentally and physically safe for all involved.
The S.T.A.R.S. mentors may provide additional counseling to students by helping them set and identify goals, find potential solutions to problems, and process through the day-to-day life pressures that mentees may find challenging.
S.T.A.R.S. applies basic individually designed mentoring concepts through interactions with students in need. The interaction is designed to address these needs through activities centered on discipline, teaching, and counseling.
The S.T.A.R.S. program meets the needs of its students through the following basic functions:
Social Emotional Growth: Healing – Brought about in their lives, aiming at wholeness and completeness in order that they function well.
Personal Growth – Sustaining: The ability to assist individuals to handle difficult times in their lives, which include crises that are developmentally oriented or situational determined.
Guiding: Removing confusion from individuals and giving them a set of beliefs and standards they can live by and trust.
Reconciling: The reestablishing of relationships that have been broken, both within themselves and with others.
Nurturing: Helping individuals to sense the security and affirmation of being loved within themselves and family.
