Five Questions With: H. Terri Adelman

H. Terri Adelman has been executive director of Inspiring Minds, formerly VIPS (Volunteers In Providence Schools) since 1993. In that time, the organization has grown from a small volunteer placement agency with a $150,000 budget to an education nonprofit with a budget of nearly $2 million. The agency serves hundreds of students with individual intensive intervention and tutoring. Another 150 high school students get academic support and hands-on learning in the Inspiring Minds Tech Center. Here Adelman discusses how the nonprofit is fulfilling its mission.

PBN: Inspiring Minds provides “intensive intervention” for Providence students. What type of activity and interaction does that entail?
ADELMAN:
Inspiring Minds creates successful young learners by providing intervention activities to those struggling. We do this because yearly, over half the kindergarten students enter our urban public schools 1.5 years or more behind. Without “intense intervention” provided in partnership with the schools, they don’t get on track quickly, if ever.
For example, a volunteer was surprised that her 5-year-old students couldn’t recognize their own names or even had difficulty holding a crayon. Studies show that young children are the easiest to help, the help has long term impact, and early learning success is an indicator for future success. That is why Inspiring Minds focuses its activities on this critical age, and the urgent issue of providing children with a solid foundation in basic skills. Such preparation enables them to handle challenging curriculum in the middle and high school grades and graduate.
Since children have a range of learning gaps, our trained academic mentors provide diverse help starting with our summer K-Prep program that enrolls 180 children. Activities can include reading support, instruction on writing, games to understand numbers, following directions, increasing their vocabulary and socialization. The August K-Prep gives a huge kick-start to those behind.
In all of Inspiring Minds’ activities, the adult-to-student ratio is small at 1:3. We manage this ratio because 100 community members understand the urgency of our work and volunteer to be trained to assist the classroom teacher. The intervention from academic mentors continues until students are on track to becoming proficient in reading and math by third grade.

PBN: What is the Inspiring Minds Tech Center and how do students take advantage of its services?
ADELMAN:
The Tech Center was created to provide high school students with increased opportunities to become knowledgeable about the many engineering fields including the skills and education required. This awareness is accomplished through hands-on projects that promote creativity and problem solving, presentations by engineering professionals, and field trips to businesses, manufacturers and universities.
Most young people acquire a desire to learn through enriching learning experiences provided by their families and their environment. For many of our urban students, learning experiences are limited, so why should we expect them to be motivated when they have not had the opportunity to become excited by their experiences and knowledge? Society has great expectations of our young but it needs to do much more to expose them to what is available in life.
The Tech Center counters this barrier with opportunities, primarily its initial introduction to engineering with the chance to learn in greater depth. A special focus for Inspiring Minds is to engage more female students in “Girls in Engineering” projects. The Brown University engineering students delivering the activities are fantastic role models.
Word of mouth brings students to the center to build solar-powered equipment, learn 3-D printing, fabricate structures, learn computer programming, animation and game creation and take English classes for credit. All activities enhance youth development, critical thinking and problem solving.

PBN: How does your business involvement program work? Who are some of your repeat participants?
ADELMAN:
Our primary business involvement program is the Power Lunch reading program. We have 19 businesses that support their employees to help our students as mentors around the activity of reading.
Once a week, each business team goes to their assigned school and meets with their assigned students during lunch time. They work with their child on reading, but also build mentoring relationships with the children. They start with their student in kindergarten and stay with them through elementary school. This is vital to children, especially in these times when so much of school is focused on academics.
Inspiring Minds is continually recruiting and managing partnerships with additional businesses. Mayor Angel Taveras, with his Providence Reads initiative, encouraged more to sign up.
For those businesses who may not want to engage in reading or in weekly activities, there are so many ways they can be of assistance to students, a school or teacher. Two examples are field trips to a place of business or as guest speakers in classrooms for career awareness. Many businesses believe in giving back. Several long time partners are: Gilbane, Lifespan, Bank of America, Citizens, Bank Rhode Island, and the Edwards Wildman law firm.

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PBN: How does the nonprofit keep donors and supporters engaged?
ADELMAN
: Inspiring Minds is an organization that requires community resources to carry out its mission of helping struggling students become successful students. We acquire, engage, and create these resources through collaborations and partnerships with a variety of entities in the community which we often become aware of or connected to because our supporters and donors are actively engaged in making it happen.
Inspiring Minds keeps donors and supporters aware of our activities, students’ needs, and inventive ideas we have for addressing problems. Having this information, our supporters know what resources, connections, or additional ideas can be of assistance to Inspiring Minds’ work.

PBN: How do you measure success?
ADELMAN:
Inspiring Minds measures success based on [reaching] the goals in our initiatives. The Intense Intervention’s goal is to accelerate the learning of struggling students, so our measure is whether the students are catching up at a faster rate than similar peers who are not served.
We also are now seeking funds to undertake the laborious job of collecting longitudinal data of the students who are now in the upper grades to measure skill retention.
The Tech Center has two measures, and one impacts the other. We measure the quality of our programs by the attendance of the students. High school students vote with their feet, so first we must offer quality and interesting activities. Then, we will measure the information, awareness, problem-solving and other skills students gained through the projects.
The Power Lunch program also has two measures: the retention of the business reading mentors from year to year, and the students’ increased interest in reading, improved reading skill and subject comprehension.
A measure of success for the organization itself is no different than that of a business: Is our service of the quality and appropriateness required by our customers? Is it sought after? And can it secure funding to continue its work?

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