Meet Our Current Partner
Meet The Academy @ Shawnee
The Academy @ Shawnee is a magnet high school in the Jefferson County Public School District in northwest Louisville, Kentucky with a focus in Aerospace. Qualifying students choose from Aerospace-Flight, Aerospace-Maintenance, Aerospace-Travel & Tourism, Aerospace Engineering, and the Navy Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps.
With magnet programs in aviation-flight, aviation-maintenance, engineering, and naval junior ROTC, the Academy offers unique opportunities to all of Jefferson County. A small high school, the Academy serves approximately 500 students; 90% come from the immediate resides area. The Academy meets the high needs population (poverty, special education, & adjudication) with extensive therapeutic, health, and basic needs services that reach into the family and the home.
We're honored to be curating a collection of 50 YA fiction books written by Black authors to live as a permanent collection in the new media center.
Past Partners:
HomeWorks Trenton is a free, after-school residential program for marginalized high school girls. Specifically in Trenton, New Jersey, HomeWorks aims to work alongside our scholars to disrupt the narrative that Black and Brown girls’ lives are defined by the cyclical effects of systemic injustice. We accomplish this by providing a space to explore and reclaim power over their experiences, cultures and identities, and fostering a community of young women dedicated to breaking down social injustices in their home communities and beyond. From Sunday evenings to Friday mornings, our scholars live in the HomeWorks house and are transported to and from their public schools. Every afternoon, the girls engage in activities focused on academics, life skills, female empowerment, and civic engagement. They then eat a family-style meal and stay overnight in our dorm with two full-time staff.
Mission: HomeWorks inspires and equips young women from marginalized communities to achieve their potential and positively transform the world around them by providing a supportive and educational residential environment.
Vision: Communities of young women around the world breaking down educational and gender barriers to social justice.
What They're Reading
“For HomeWorks Scholars Finding Their Place in a World That Shuts Them Out” seeks to use Ntzoke Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf as a guide to not only highlight how vulnerable Black and Latinx girls are to the mental, physical, and emotional wear-and-tear of racism and discimination, but name and call out the various ways Black and Latinx girls center and make space for themselves in spite of racial and gender injustice.