After-School All-Stars

Our goals for our All-Stars are that they grow up safe and healthy, graduate from high school and go to college, find careers they love, and give back to their communities. To reach the students in greatest need, ASAS focuses exclusively on youth from under-resourced schools and communities. ASAS is working to reinvent what after-school time looks like for our students. Their schools offer limited opportunities for the diverse enrichment and experiential learning opportunities that power creative thinking and build social-emotional skills. Such schools often struggle to offer students consistent access to necessary supports, including academic interventions, counseling, and family educational resources. Through our holistic approaches to extended-day learning, ASAS helps fill this gap and enhance underserved students’ opportunities to grow and thrive.

To best serve our youth, ASAS uses a comprehensive approach that expands access to and improves the quality of educational experiences in five key areas: Health & Wellness; Academic Readiness; Career Exploration; STEM; and Visual & Performing Arts. We are strategic in our focus on out-of-school programming for middle school youth. Extensive research demonstrates that both the middle-school years and the after-school hours represent crucial windows in which youth engage in activities that will shape their futures.

Unfortunately, such opportunities are not distributed equitably, and are often least accessible to those youth who need them most. “From Risk to Opportunity: Afterschool Programs Keep Kids Safe When Juvenile Crime Peaks,” a study published in October 2019 by the Council for a Strong America in partnership with Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, reports that “afterschool programming is unavailable for over 19 million children, more than half of whom are low-income, whose parents would enroll them if an afterschool program was available.” Such disparities in academic opportunity are closely related to other social inequalities that influence each other and impact the youth we serve, who regularly face many challenges and stressors that rarely if ever affect the lives of their more privileged peers. The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified these challenges by further restricting the already limited access underserved youth have to such opportunities and exacerbating educational, financial, justice, and health inequalities rooted in structural racism and systemic poverty.

For these reasons, and in order to reach those students in greatest need, ASAS focuses exclusively on youth from underserved schools and communities. At a time when our students need these programs more than ever, we provide them with more than just enrichment programs that keep them engaged: we help fill the achievement gap and help youth develop lifelong skills that transform the way they see themselves and their ability to impact the world.

ASAS' highly collaborative, school-based program model is unique because it allows programs to be adapted to the needs of each school with which we partner. Through our school relationships and conversations with principals and other administrators, we are better able to understand and respond to student needs. In addition to tailoring our curriculum to individual schools, we have been able to build relationships between our schools and ASAS program partners who provide innovative curricula, from STEM programs to performing arts.

ASAS is committed to the continued financial health and vitality of our programs. We work toward long-term sustainability through continually cultivating a diverse pool of strategically aligned donors and by building a group of core, sustaining partners, with a focus on securing multi-year commitments. The ASAS National Development and Operations teams have staff dedicated solely to grants managements and administration. They have expertise in finance, including the accounting and management of restricted funding, programmatic requirements associated with public and private grant funding, and grant reporting. Our national team supports our local chapters with fundraising development, marketing, operations, and strategic leadership to ensure that each chapter has the capacity to grow and execute strong programming.

Traditionally, we have offered programs in person at school sites. When schools closed in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we pivoted to a more community-focused model and began offering virtual programs. To meet students’ needs in the pandemic-informed learning environment of the 2020-21 academic year, we continue to offer virtual programming in all chapters, including in Los Angeles, though we also offer in-person and hybrid options in locations where it is safe and feasible to do so. We have developed safety plans for in-person programming. We will use Virtual Learning to help bridge the transition to in-person programs, and we anticipate preserving some level of Virtual Learning even after we fully resume our core school-based programming.

By providing diverse, high-quality enrichment for youth from underserved communities, ASAS aims to break cycles of inequality. We have responded to the COVID-19 health crisis—and related financial, educational, and justice crises rooted in systemic racism—by adapting our model to address current realities, meet urgent needs, and engage more deeply with families and communities. Guided by the belief that social-emotional skills and antiracist practices are inseparable, we have structured our programs with the goal of helping heal our students and empower them to share their experiences, perspectives, and stories. We expect this work to yield positive impact on the individual and community levels.

To this end, we continue to provide safe spaces and incorporate SEL and restorative practice with program content. We are elevating youth voices and providing students with the tools and platforms for youth-led social justice storytelling. Major events such as All-Star Leadership University, our annual youth leadership gathering, and All-Star Academies, our new model of intensive, discipline-focused skill-building courses and convenings piloted with our successful Songwriting Academy, provide high-profile platforms for youth voices and empower underserved students to express their feelings, stories, perspectives, and ideas about justice.

ASAS expects to meet the following objectives and outcomes through our comprehensive programming:

Objective 1: Students will be academically engaged with high self-confidence
o Outcome: 70% of regular participants in our Academic Readiness programming will demonstrate high levels of academic confidence, believing they can do well in school even if it is challenging

Objective 2: Students will engage in regular moderate to vigorous physical activity
o Outcome: 70% of regular participants in our Health & Wellness programming will report having exercised at least three days per week

Objective 3: Students will develop career pathway confidence
o Outcome: 70% of regular participants in our Career Exploration programming will report having confidence in their ability to understand and navigate various career pathways

Objective 4: Students will develop their personal voices as an essential component of youth development
o Outcome: 80% of regular participants in our programming will report feeling empowered to share their thoughts, ideas, and feelings

Objective 5: Students will enhance their social-emotional health and have a greater chance to thrive
o Outcome: 70% of regular participants in our programming will report having confidence in their ability to cope with adversity and manage emotions