Educate Tomorrow

Educate Tomorrow is focused on connecting disenfranchised, low-income individuals with opportunities and a life-long community of support.

This support includes complete care coordination, rewards for reaching goals, college coaching, career advice, trauma reduction, and a sense of family with milestone achievement celebrations, all of which equals increased stability in the lives of people desperately in need of it.

Educate Tomorrow provides opportunities for housing, educational enrichment, after school and summer academic experiences, mentorships, tutoring, scholarships, financial literacy, volunteer service, internships, networking, employment, college tours, resume building, and building and becoming an integral, contributing, supportive member of the community.

Educate Tomorrow also offers The College Experience, where students gain valuable skills in preparing to go to college, including an intense summer camp enrichment program, a college tour of campuses across the state of Florida, and academic and life skills trainings throughout the school year.

And young women participate in the Educate Tomorrow Women’s Executive Internship program, Finding your Power, Purpose and Presence (P3), gaining self-awareness, mindfulness, life skills, life coaching, enhanced resumes, and a yearlong internship with a female executive in Miami.

Educate Tomorrow addresses the issue of secondary and postsecondary educational attainment by integrating activities designed to support the physical, emotional, social, and academic needs of participating youth. This holistic emphasis on the interconnected skill sets of our youth serves to differentiate our program from more traditional mentoring programs, enabling it to be more effective in impacting the lives of our youth.

In 2013 Educate Tomorrow entered into partnerships with Miami-Dade College and Florida International University. Through these partnerships, we were able to create programs and a full-time dedicated staff member at each institution that works with Educate Tomorrow students and any student who is eligible for the college tuition waiver due to being involved in the foster care system or being homeless.

John Emerson, who leads Casey Family Program's postsecondary education and training for youth in foster care recently said, “an exemplary Florida initiative is Educate Tomorrow's work in [South Florida]. They are bringing community partners together to address academic achievement issues for those in foster care – including postsecondary education and training. Their work promoting community dialog and planning includes... work with community colleges. This is an area of national need."

Educate Tomorrow's program strategy is to enhance the proven methodology of one-on-one mentoring/life coaching by providing the unique focus of education and acquisition of life skills to promote education as the path to independence. Unlike other mentoring programs, Educate Tomorrow offers volunteers a specific focus – educational & life skills.

Therefore the Educate Tomorrow program is intensive and requires a high level of commitment from the students and staff. Providing program participants with a specific mandate focuses efforts on highly specific results. Educate Tomorrow's strategy is simple: motivate and guide students toward receiving a high school diploma and pursuing postsecondary education (along with other available financial aid), while equipping them with the basic life skills to succeed along the way.

One-on-one mentoring/life coaching is particularly effective with Educate Tomorrow's target population which, by and large, has the desire to succeed, but lacks the confidence, knowledge and resources necessary to pursue educational opportunities (particularly post-secondary opportunities). Educate Tomorrow mentors are trained to assist their mentees and encourage them through the process.

Educate Tomorrow was founded in Miami in 2003 out of the desire to support these youth one on one to take advantage of this great opportunity for postsecondary education and to spread the word in Miami-Dade County and throughout Florida that the opportunity exists.

According to the Florida University System, during the 2002-2003 academic year only eight former foster youth were taking advantage of the college tuition waiver. Educate Tomorrow realized that high school administrators and counselors, foster care case managers and college admissions departments were unaware of the opportunity presented to these youth.

Today more than 5,000 college students are using the tuition waiver statewide, and 1,500 are in the Educate Tomorrow program. Educate Tomorrow is proud to have 168 college graduates.