Better outcomes Evanston Youth
Better outcomes for youth start with the deliberate creation of better opportunities. Evanston First Alliance (EFA) places the youth of Evanston at the epicenter of a community where physical fitness serves as a doorway to better self esteem, better educational and professional opportunities, and better community support and integration. At EFA, youth don't just join the gym - they share in a vision of the present and future where they belong.
Evanston First Alliance offers programming during after school hours to provide a safe environment and opportunities for students to engage in structured physical activity, receive tutoring and homework support, and learn key life skills to help them achieve short- and long-term goals. Through daily programming, teens can experience an improvement in self-esteem, self awareness and emotional maturity.
Kids' programs
Academic Support
Each student will receive several hours of academic support every week. We will help coordinate tutoring with the numerous resources available to youth in Evanston, and offer a safe and quiet classroom space for students to do schoolwork and boost their study skills .
Recreational Activities
Our boxing and martial arts classes focus heavily on self-mastery and on embracing a code of conduct that serves both the individual and the community. They also teach self-regulation practices taught by school sociologists and psychologists to enable students to identify their feelings, suppress their impulses, and conduct themselves maturely in challenging situations.
Mentorship Roundtables
We will provide regular mentor and peer-led discussions on issues impacting our kids' lives on a daily basis such as effective communication, emotional intelligence, self-esteem, self-regulation, conflict resolution, peer pressure, and other topics of students' choosing. To keep these sessions engaging for young minds, we also have guest speakers (social workers, business people, parents, law enforcement officers, etc.) who have expressed interest in facilitating and participating in discussions in their areas of expertise.
Career Development
Our classroom space will also be used to give in-person instruction and guidance to help students (in their senior year of high school) navigate online fitness certifications that serve as the standard across the United States and are even valid internationally. The in-person instruction will also include hands-on training in our gym facility to give our students practical experience and the opportunity to apply the principles learned throughout the online course. We will then help place students in fitness facilities in the Chicago Metropolitan Area and offer positions to some students within our facility. Additionally, we will offer ongoing mentoring and coaching in job communication and professional conduct skills that will give our community of young fitness professionals the critical knowledge they need to be successful in their positions.