UrbanPromise: In Camden, the Hours Between 3 and 9 Belong to the Kids

Organization: UrbanPromise

Location: Camden, NJ

Founded: 1988

Think about a 15-year-old in Camden at four o’clock on a Tuesday. School’s out. The next several hours are the ones everyone who studies this stuff worries about most — the window between the final bell and dinnertime when a kid is most likely to drift toward trouble simply because there’s nothing and no one asking anything of them. UrbanPromise built an entire organization around refusing to let those hours go to waste.

From one summer camp

It started small, the way the best things usually do. In 1988, UrbanPromise ran its first summer camp out of an old Baptist church in Camden. Today its annual expenses run more than $6 million, the organization runs its own schools, and it serves hundreds of young people and families a year with the help of hundreds of volunteers and a full-time staff. But the heart of it hasn’t changed at all. It’s still about showing up for kids in the hours that matter.

The piece I find most quietly brilliant is the StreetLeader program. Instead of only hiring adults to mentor teenagers, UrbanPromise hires the teenagers — paying older students to work as counselors and tutors for the younger ones. A 16-year-old who might otherwise be told to simply stay out of trouble is instead handed a paycheck, a responsibility, and a room full of eight-year-olds who look up to her. That does two things at once. It keeps the little ones learning, and it tells the teenager something nobody can say to her often enough: you are needed here.

It keeps the little ones learning, and it tells the teenager something nobody can say to her often enough: you are needed here.Emma Brooks

Boats, treks and classrooms

Around that core sits a whole constellation of programs built for those high-risk afternoon-into-evening hours — after-school tutoring, summer camps, the UrbanPromise Academy and its elementary and middle schools. There’s UrbanBoatWorks, where students have built at least 47 wooden boats by hand since 2009, and UrbanTrekkers, which takes Camden kids out into the kind of rivers and mountains and experiences that too often get treated as somebody else’s birthright. The results speak plainly: among its StreetLeaders, the organization reports a 100 percent high school graduation rate, with more than 85 percent going on to college or vocational training.

Numbers like that are easy to print and hard to earn. What earns them is the daily, unglamorous work of an adult — or a paid 17-year-old StreetLeader — being in the same room, at the same time, every single day, for a kid who needs to be able to count on something.

HOW TO HELP: UrbanPromise welcomes volunteers, mentors, and donations. Learn more about supporting its Camden programs at urbanpromiseusa.org.

Based on publicly available information about UrbanPromise.