URBAN YOUTH IMPACT INC

Together, with our partners, we help improve students’ reading ability to succeed in school, strengthen their employability and leadership skills to succeed in the marketplace, and help them discover their God-given purpose to succeed in life. We enhance their life experiences through mentor relationships. Our award-winning programs have low student/teacher ratios, intentional loving relationships, and are sustained by community partnerships, foundations, businesses, churches, and individuals.

Our strategies can be summarized through our three main programs The Leadership Academy, Reframe and CREATE (Connecting, Restoring, Empowering Artists Through Experiences).

The Leadership Academy is our after-school program which provides a continuum of services for Kindergarten to college, increasing a student's chances for future success with each passing year. The Leadership Academy participants receive academic assistance primarily in literacy, character development, social skills emotional guidance, spiritual enrichment.

Reframe is our year-round program empowers youth 14-22 through mentorship, college prep, and career exploration. Students participate in weekly workshops, field trips as well as post-secondary advising. The program affords opportunities for job and internship search. Since its inception, Reframe participation has resulted in over 200 internship placements.

CREATE (Connecting, Restoring, Empowering Artists Through Experiences). CREATE is a program that uses arts and sciences to connect students with each other and God, to restore them to who God's created them to be, and empower them to creatively express themselves while impacting the world around them.

When Urban Youth Impact began in 1997, we were reaching small groups of kids through neighborhood outreaches. Over twenty years later, students gather regularly at Urban Youth Impact's 32,000 square foot ‘campus‘ in West Palm Beach, FL. We are serving hundreds of inner-city kids each week to improve their literacy scores to excel in school, leadership skills to increase their employability in the marketplace, apply biblical lessons to their lives, and expand their life experiences through music, the arts, cooking, and photography.

For over 20 years, Urban Youth Impact has faithfully served the inner-city community and enjoys wide-spread respect and support from leaders across the city and county; local leaders in business, government, churches, foundations and from other nonprofit organizations. Today, as an organization, we are even better positioned to serve our neighborhoods. Our Founder, Bill Hobbs, who left his PGA golf pro career to follow the Lord's purpose for his life, began this ministry with only a few dollars in the bank. Now, Urban Youth Impact has a staff of over 40 team members and a budget of in excess of $3.0 million. Bill spends time investing and inspiring new people to join us on our mission of loving, equipping and empowering inner-city youth. Our president, Chris Tress, has served with us in various leadership capacities for over twenty years and now leads us, as we continue to ignite change in our community.

As we look toward the future, Urban Youth Impact is in the process of completing a three-phase development plan.

Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the plan have already been completed.

Phase 1 included a 200-seat Life Center auditorium for student presentations, chapel services, as well as community events. The total investment of phase-one was $1.9 million and was finished in the summer of 2018.

Phase 2 of the plan included 7 additional classrooms for 84 more students to be enrolled in The Leadership Academy and a state of the art teaching kitchen for our CREATE program and was completed in August 2021. The total investment for phase-two was an additional $1.6 million.

The third and final phase of the plan will include relocation of the Administrative staff to the 2nd floor of the Life Center, a complete renovation of the existing Administration Building, which will become the Early Learning Center, and the renovation of the 2nd Floor of the Education Building to include an expansion of our Reframe program and the soon to be launched Experiencing Unexpected Pathways ('EUP') program, where inner-city youth will have the opportunity to explore their future opportunities for growth in the Fine Arts, Music & Dance, Audio-Visual concepts, as well as computer related fields like website development, social media marketing, graphic art, CAD design and business systems.