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While many young people in New York City are heading upstate for camp or getting ready for the full slate of activities that awaits them here, many low income youth have no such places to go and no such experiences to look forward to. Not only do low income students miss out on theses valuable experiences, their lack of participation in structured, engaging, and enriching activities in the summer months means they actually finish the summer worse off than they began it. The summer months hold great potential for providing low-income youth with enriching educational opportunities, but in fact these youth often return to school further behind and less prepared than their more affluent peers. While many organizations provide excellent summer programs, many more require assistance and capacity-building to strengthen their academic and literacy-building components and incorporate these into their more traditional summer plans so that young people return to school ready and eager to learn. Since 2001, PASE has provided organizations with this support through the Summer Learning Initiative. The project aims to prevent summer learning loss among young people by providing literacy and learning activities that support school year learning, to increase the capacity of youth-serving organizations to incorporate literacy activities into summer programs, and to share lessons learned from the initiative through the dissemination of information and resources to youth service providers throughout New York City. Each year, PASE works with 25 youth-serving organizations throughout the school year and into the summer in order to help them design, plan, and implement high-quality summer programs that will provide the youth they serve with educationally enriching experiences. These sites take part in a monthly training series at PASE that will help their staff understand the foundational principles of summer learning and will help them identify and address challenges specific to their organizations. In addition, five of these sites receive intensive, customized technical assistance that helps them integrate what they are learning in the trainings into their programs and provide them with ongoing problem-solving support. To help these organizations achieve their summer goals and integrate literacy-building activities, PASE provides 15 of these programs with college students to serve as Summer Learning Tutors. These tutors are trained and provided with a stipend by PASE, and provide support and assistance to the program as well as conduct literacy-building activities with the youth.
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