The vision is to see our urban youth grow to be self-assured competent adults that are able to make positive, healthy choices for themselves as assets in their community. One specific thing we work on is a higher graduation rates in our area of the community. We have an 86% graduation rate among the students we serve over the course of our 25 years. We are also trying to help students overcome traditional urban ills like youth crime, gang violence, teen pregnancy, drug use, etc. We want them to be community-minded and care about their neighbors and confident in their God-given value as humans.

Our strategy is that we use hockey as a unique and interesting recreational activity as a hook for and a venue for life development. Our students also receive academic tutoring and academic support, kindness and caring from adult mentors, and more. We have looked into social and emotional learning and we understand that whole-life youth development happen in all of the activities we do, like perseverance, grit and teamwork. They are learning how to be a better friend, a better listener, a critical thinker to name a few.

DinoMights' expertise is in urban youth work combined with ice hockey for the past 25 years. We have an experienced staff, some of whom were DinoMights as kids. We provide a service that is found no place else in the State of Minnesota.

We want all youth to grow in physical strength, agility and coordination. We measure hockey skills using a coach evaluation tool. We want youth to feel success in their hockey skills over the course of the year using a participant evaluation. We want to improve elementary tutoring students reading grade level by one full year over the course of one school year, measured by reading assessments. We do regular grade and attendance checks for middle and high schoolers. We want to increase all students self-esteem and confidence measured by participant evaluations. We want youth to feel satisfaction in and understand the importance of people and community-building through community service projects, positive peer group and mentoring. We want every child to know their God-given worth and understand that they are valuable individuals. We want students to develop as well-rounded individuals measured by Search Institutes Social and Emotional measurement tool. We also measure retention rates and our goal is to be 80% or higher each year. We measure high school graduation and our goal is to be higher than the rate of those students who are not DinoMights. We also do a self-assessment on programming using the Youth Program Quality Assessment.

The biggest accomplishment is that 86% of our kids have graduated from high school which is 30-40% higher in Minneapolis Public Schools over the same tie period. Reading assessment shows 90% or more made progress over the course of the year. Participant evaluations consistently show 90% satisfaction in all program areas. 2019-2020 are the first years for the social emotional tool, so we will know more on that soon. Over half of our staff members are alumni and so we have grown up indigeneous leaders. We opened a new site successfully in St. Paul in 2018 and we continue to make improvements to our outdoor rink, the Billy Lindsay Rink and hope to add refrigeration to that site within a year.