Wouldn’t it be awesome if any high school student who needed a private tutor could find dozens for free right at their school? The average cost of a high school student’s time for tutoring is around $30 an hour. Steep for someone without a job and parent busy paying the mortgage. Learning this fact just a now made me even more proud of my organization’s ability to provide well over 100 hours of free high school tutoring in its first year at only one location, pretty awesome right? Unfortunately, the program has reached its limits and then some, but don’t worry, you can help! With just this one grant we could run for more then two years at any number of schools and likely sustain ourselves indefinitely afterwards! The idea for the HELP Foundation was born from the peer tutoring program, called the HELP Club, that I started that brought the intelligent and driven students desiring community service hours and work experience together with hard working students struggling to learn a particular discipline from their teacher, a common problem in a school with 25 student classes and overworked teachers. The program was extremely successful, ending the year with over 80 members in a school with little over 1,000 students.
Though I was extremely proud of the program it inevitably fell apart after my failure to receive any grant money or fiscal sponsorship. The fact of the matter was that no one was able to put in the immense amount of time required to operate the club without a website smoothly. For this reason I spent many 15-20 hour weeks working to find a way to build a cheap website to assist the organization process so that not only Somerville High would be able to smoothly run a peer tutoring program, but any other school. Once the website is acquired I plan to file for incorporation and a 501c3 for the HELP Foundation, a non-profit that would monitor the website and provide it to any school that had an individual who desired to start a HELP Club.