TLT - Tomorrows Leaders Today Inc

TLT’s goals are straight forward.
1- Provide youth/young adults with real life soft skills that are no longer being taught in schools, that are not being learned at home, but employers are looking for.
2- Provide basic real life soft-skills, higher education and career readiness through group discussions, hands on exercises, speakers, and presentations about the civic, corporate, charitable, and educational opportunities right in their community. The classes each will complete a community project.
3- Texas young adults ages High School Juniors, Seniors and students attending a college or University from Collin, Dallas, Denton, Grayson, and Tarrant Counties take part in a curriculum based, hands-on internship opportunity to gain valuable work experience, explore a career path, develop, and refine skills, gain confidence, and build professional relationships. All career paths can find a valuable opportunity in one of the positions offered, the experience is tailored to the student.
4- Provide free and low cost online courses and presentations on a variety of real-life soft skills and career readiness topics.
5- Empowerment opportunity for young adults so they fall in love with where they live, become involved earlier, embrace their civic responsibilities, and want to become leaders in their community.
6- Provide building blocks -Character, Communication, Confidence, Creativity, Inclusion, Integrity, Problem Solving, Teamwork, Action and Vision being highlighted while catering to the TLT- Tomorrows Leaders Today, Inc. “TLT” participants and their individual needs and goals.

As of January 2022, we have are working with eighteen colleges and universities and several local high schools to provide internships to students who need the experience, the course credit, or volunteer hours through remote intern postions offered year round by semester. Some of the universities are giving their student credit for participating in our program. We want the number of youth served to grow and fill the need, especially to underserved communities.

Integrity: Forms the foundation of our organization. We grow our organization based on interactions that promote mutual trust and respect. We strive to ensure the highest level of organizational effectiveness by continually reviewing our programs and processes.

Community Partnership: We value community partnerships. We recognize the importance of working with community organizations to strengthen our programs by helping us provide all young people the opportunity to participate in and benefit from a TLT program. We value the input we receive from our community partners and strive to work together cooperatively and constructively for the betterment of all.

Excellence: We encourage leadership and innovation in business, education and social responsibility. We believe that leadership skills can and should be continually improved and refined.

Diversity: We value and embrace diversity. We seek out views that reflect all walks of life and reflect those views in our programs. We are sensitive to the special needs and diverse backgrounds of individuals, our students, volunteers and our communities. We give all individuals an equal opportunity to be heard and to benefit from our programs.

• Adult advocates who volunteer at the organization as part of the program
• Assessments, administered through the program, that are designed to evaluate student readiness for college or career
• Peer or community mentoring partnerships, job-shadowing or other similar activities delivered as part of the proposed program
• Supplemental or content specific curriculum or classroom instruction (e.g., advanced placement courses) delivered through the program
• Small learning communities, extended learning time, core academic teacher teams, school within a school or other similar personalized learning environments as part of the program
• Program staff or volunteers assigned to assist students with activities such as college searches application to postsecondary institutions, or enrollment in post secondary education
• Use longitudinal student-level databases to measure success of the program
• Established relationships through Data Sharing Agreements, Memorandums of Understanding, or IRBs with schools/districts/third-party evaluators
• Corporate and small business partnerships for intern project assignments, potential job placements & job shadowing
• We have built in surveys and evaluations to measure results in all areas, online courses, intern remote program, in-persons sessions and with our alumni
• frequent review of each program's progress and performance

We started TLT in mid-2019 with just one in-person program, TLT Leaders, focused on working with each 8th grade-College participant to integrate their career path/goals, while developing leadership qualities and real-life skills, higher education and career readiness through group discussions, speakers, and presentations about the civic, corporate, charitable, and educational center opportunities right in their community. This is an eight-week program that meets weekly for 2.5 hours.
In March of 2020, this all changed with Covid 19, our program shut down with everyone else. We look forward to starting up both the TLT Leaders and the TLT Unlocking the Future programs, in-person programs this fall. These programs will be held in homeless shelters, schools, community groups, wherever they are needed, as we did prior to Covid.
Determined to find a way to serve and follow our mission we created the TLT Leading Leaders Intern Program with just two students from one university. In 2020 we had thirteen interns go through the program.
In June 2021 we are at thirty-one interns served through eleven universities and colleges with the rest of the year to go. We also had our first high school intern start this summer.
In the second half of 2020, we created the TLT Learning Center and at year end had six courses and presentations that fifty-nine diverse individuals visited from fourteen different zip codes.
In 2021 our Learning Center has over nineteen learning options which we are gathering age, gender, ethnicity, zip code data with each visit.
Our board went from three members to seven, four advisory board members and five youth advisory board members.