Student Athletes for Educational Opportunities (SAFEO), Inc.

SAFEO aim to increase its enrollment to 30% by the year 2020 by enlisting participants in three of our most cornerstone programs. For 18 years our "ACADEMIC SUPPORT PROGRAM" has been one of Washington DC's premier services for its resources for after school tutoring, SAT/ ACT prep, college referrals, contacts for college coached and athletic directors college tours, financial aid and scholarship opportunities. These services are taken advantage of by both student athletes and their parent. From 2015-2017 over 1500 youth and families registered.

Since the launching of our " I PROMISE" CONCUSSION AWARENESS CAMPAIGN in 2011, we have enlisted over 3,000 student athletes, parents, coaches and teachers agreeing to take the I Promise pledge; promising to speak up if a concussion has occurred.

The mission of the campaign is directed to inner city athletes, largely minorities, who typically are the last to be informed about the repercussions of concussion. In impoverished neighborhoods where athletic accomplishment is in most cases is the only possible route to college, studies show far more concussions occur than in affluent areas. Kids are willing to take risks so that they can continue to play. And for a lot of these student athletes, they don't have another future planned. Sports are it.

The campaign has experienced enormous success, by hosting awareness conferences, record breaking pledges and conducting monthly community outreach efforts. Our goal in 2017-18 is to secure funding and work with our partner at INOVA Sports Medicine Concussion Clinic to provide free baseline cognitive testing to 5,000 middle and high school student athletes in DC.

Baseline testing is mandatory for sports participation and is an important element to an athletes profile. It's a cognitive assessment that evaluates areas of brain function; which includes: memory, concentration, processing speed, language, and reasoning capabilities. However, the price points for these assessments can range from $40 to $350 which often times is too expensive for the population we serve.

Our "GIVING BACK MAKING AN IMPACT" program focuses on community service impact and receiving community service hours. From 2013 to present SAFEO has partnered with the Washington Redskins Charitable Foundation where we provide volunteers ages 16 and older to serve as customer service reps for each Redskins home game at FedEx stadium. Their duties range from inventory, food prep, food service, health department reports, customer service, cooks, runners and cashiers.

In 2013 we first enlisted 280 volunteers. From 2014-2016 our roster grew at a yearly rate of 700 repeat and new volunteers. These outcomes resulted in an increase participation of parents, coaches and corporate supporters, and a stunning accumulation of over 10.000 community service hours for our students. Our goal for the 2017-18 NFL season is to register 800 new and repeat volunteers.

To engage "state-of-society" programs and projects that are compelling to young athletes and address specifically what they want to know and what they need to know, based on research-driven findings, as well as constant inter-communications with community-wide leaders, the youth themselves, current, former college and professional athletes and the community at-large.

For the remainder of 2017-through 2018 our strategy will also be to conduct a survey with 100% of our new and returning participants between 16-17 years of age; including their parents which will have a high concentration of questions geard towards the benefits they've received by joining SAFEO.

The organization's capabilities for doing this is to continue to increase the number of volunteer staffing. Our staff are of the highest cailber and credentials; we partner with local school systems, Department of Recreation, governmental and private sector partners and corporate partners like Nike to effect increased program effectiveness.

Our leadership, although 95% are volunteer is stable, with a ever increasing outreach to the community at large. We take a student -to-student approach where the majority of them are college athletes from local college and universities such as Howard university, the university of Maryland , and Georgetown just to list a few.

In 2016 we maintained a college student athlete/ student ratio of 5 for every 30. An account of our parent/ students, resulted in a 10/45 ratio. With the ability to maintain the ratio in moving forward for the years to come it will ensure that our organization will have the capability to meet our goals.

We have launched and successfully engaged a number of youth development programs on a "shoe string" budget over the years, yet the main constraint is consistent and sufficient funding.

Our programs target a population that few have been able to successfully engage in meaningful and sustainable life-changing activities - they are not single year focused, but instead, life-long directed, and as such, we require sustainable funding streams and not project-based funding, to be able to maintain our efforts over the long haul.

What's next? We plan to continue to update our GuideStar page to highlight our willingness to be transparent, the good work we do and demonstrate accountability with the hopes that foundation and donors will take notice and provide us the funding needed to sustain our programs and services.