Our Why
Did you know that students spend 80% of their waking hours outside of school? That fact sends a clear message that learning ONLY during traditional school hours will not be sufficient to help students become fully contributing members of our modern society. Extended learning—programs for students outside of school hours—are a staple for students from upper-income households. In fact, they participate in these types of programs at 9 times the rate of students from disenfranchised communities. This imbalance is UNJUST and leads to significant disparities in both graduation and dropout rates—cause Black and Brown youth to suffer disproportionately.
Our How
Change The Tune is a 501c3 nonprofit that works to close the opportunity gap for youth in underserved communities by creating holistic, radical, and transformational extended learning experiences in partnership with communal organizations. We have three key strategies in our approach to this work:
- Create & Lead Programs that Students Love
- Train & Develop Organization & School Leaders
- Mobilize Communities to Invest in Innovative Learning Approaches
Our Programming
We have two extended learning programs where we directly support students.
The Lab
AfterSchool with Change The Tune
Change the Tune looks to reimagine the student experience through their experiential, trauma informed, project based multidisciplinary art classes, that empowers students with the tools to be able to design and create sustainable social enterprise models that will benefit their local community.
The Studio
Summer with Change The Tune
The Studio is an accessible, hands-on, collaborative summer program whereby through a collection of intentionally designed experiences, teachers are transformed into impactful facilitators of learning and students into solution-focused leaders.
Training & Developing
Our summer program is not only a camp for kids, it is also a hands-on and experiential camp for facilitators to learn how to run revolutionary programming. While the students are learning, educators are simultaneously building their own model for an out-of-school-time program that they hope to implement in the near future. We also partner with schools and districts to teach them how to build and run summer and afterschool programs.
Mobilizing Communities
We are building a student advisory board to guide this area of our work. As we consult with and lead districts, we strongly encourage them to use surveys and build their own advisory teams from students, parents, and family members to help them design programs aligned to the needs of the communities they serve. We also add capacity to various partners with their fundraising processes. Long term, we hope to partner with communities to advocate for more out-of-school-time government and corporate funding and for more programming from nearby schools and organizations.
“It changed the way I see the world because now I wanna make my community a better and safer place for kids to be kids and not have to worry about where they can and can’t go because of gang and gun violence.”
-Jeremiah K., CTT student
“I felt my identity was finally being seen.”
-CTT student