A Baltimore youth charity surrounds struggling teenagers with a team of volunteers who push, pull, and cajole them to success. It’s tough and labor-intensive, but it works. What will it take to help it grow?
Sarah Hemminger was idling at a stoplight when she had her Big Idea.
She was driving to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she was working on a graduate degree. Nearby towered Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, a nearly all-black public school bordered on one side by the gleaming Hopkins medical campus and otherwise surrounded by grim row homes and housing projects.
The big idea was simple: connect the two worlds by creating a “family” of volunteers for Dunbar students who struggle academically — and keep each student tucked into that family’s embrace for 10 years.
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Sarah Hemminger was idling at a stoplight when she had her Big Idea.
She was driving to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she was working on a graduate degree. Nearby towered Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, a nearly all-black public school bordered on one side by the gleaming Hopkins medical campus and otherwise surrounded by grim row homes and housing projects.
The big idea was simple: connect the two worlds by creating a “family” of volunteers for Dunbar students who struggle academically — and keep each student tucked into that family’s embrace for 10 years.
No matter what it takes.
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In the 13 years since, Ms. Hemminger’s big idea has served more than 300 and seen more than 87 percent of those who have stayed in the program for at least five years earn high-school diplomas.
The idea has landed her and her group, Thread, a TEDx Talk and a spotlight at a 2015 Giving Tuesday event alongside Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. She’s won support from the Kresge Foundation and other grant makers and recruited more volunteers than she can keep busy.
And she’s fielded calls from more than 30 cities, each seeking its own strand of Thread.
“It’s the most effective antipoverty program that I’m aware of,” says Robert Embry Jr., president of the Abell Foundation in Baltimore.
Abell, which focuses largely on poverty, has given $815,000 to Thread since 2008, when it was still known as the Incentive Mentoring Program. Mr. Embry says the charity’s success with adolescents contradicts conventional wisdom “about how if you don’t catch a child by preschool or you don’t catch a child by third grade, that’s it.”
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Growing Pains
Thread’s formula for putting vulnerable young people on a path to success may be unique, but the outlines of its story are not. Over the years, other innovative nonprofit programs have sprung up around the country, drawing attention from donors, grant makers, and government officials.
Like Thread, these programs get results — and have the data donors love to prove it.
But spreading a big idea far and wide depends on many stars aligning. The history of philanthropy is littered with examples of innovative programs that triumphed on their home turf but could not be replicated more widely, for a variety of reasons. Money, talent, and political climate help determine where bold nonprofit solutions can take root.
Thread’s buddy-system structure is designed to guard against volunteer burnout.
And also this: Many of the most successful big ideas, like Thread, require a labor-intensive, long-term, hands-on approach to get results. As Ms. Hemminger says of her charity’s work, “It’s not sexy.”
Thread’s model for pushing kids out of troubled adolescence and into productive adulthood, Mr. Embry says, is “both depressing and exciting. Depressing in what it takes to do it in volunteer time, and exciting because it’s possible.”
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‘How Fast Is Too Fast?’
The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation began supporting Thread in 2011 and has given $400,000 to date. Despite the Baltimore-area grant maker’s belief in Thread’s model, one of its officials sees challenges ahead as the charity grows.
“I think scaling any intensive program like this is always really hard,” says Sheryl Goldstein, Weinberg’s managing director for programs and grants.
Philanthropic support, she says, is not necessarily the factor that determines the success of groups like Thread. Leadership can make a copycat organization soar or sink. And Sarah Hemmingers are rare.
“These programs are led by extraordinary, dynamic, smart, driven, hard-working people,” Ms. Goldstein says. “Part of what makes their programs so successful is them and their ability to build and motivate a team.”
Thread now serves 288 young people with the help of about 1,000 volunteers, and it’s growing rapidly. As it scales up, the charity’s basic needs boil down to three things, according to Mr. Embry: manpower, money, and maintaining quality. He worries the most about the last one: “The question is, how fast is too fast?”
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Not a Disney Movie
Thread’s success is all the more remarkable because of the people it serves: students, usually males, who are in the bottom 25 percent of their freshman class.
The program currently works in three Baltimore public high schools, with students who usually have a grade-point average below 1.0. At Frederick Douglass High School, the most recent site added, the latest cohort of kids has an average GPA of 0.15, Ms. Hemminger says.
Thread focuses on that lowest quartile because of its inspiration: Ryan Hemminger, the charity’s co-founder. Ms. Hemminger says her husband was a smart kid who began failing his classes because his parents’ drug addiction plunged their lives into chaos. “He transitioned from the cornfields of Indiana to a crack house,” she says.
But a team of teachers took it upon themselves to pull him back on track, putting him on a path that led to the U.S. Naval Academy. Today, he’s chief of finance and administration at the Baltimore City Health Department.
Her husband’s example, Ms. Hemminger says, was proof that her big idea could work. She began seeking out the poorest performers at Dunbar, because “in my mind, every kid was like my husband — super smart, completely capable, just extraordinarily distracted by things outside school.”
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Not every struggling student in the program turns out to be another Ryan Hemminger. “It’s not a Disney movie,” Ms. Hemminger says. “It’s hard work.”
Still, Thread has stayed focused on kids on the academic bottom rung, for reasons its leader, who has a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering, says are rooted in neuroscience. Impulsivity increases during ages 14 to 18 — but that developmental stage also presents a window of time when decision-making skills can still be shaped.
Each student selected for Thread is assigned a pack of up to five volunteers, who are called a “family” and do anything youngsters’ kin might be expected to do for them: help with homework, pack lunches, drive them to school, listen to their romantic tribulations, help them find a summer job.
The “family” helps make the Thread program both sustainable over the long term and scalable. In a traditional one-to-one mentoring situation, Ms. Hemminger says, a solo volunteer might not be enough to help a student navigate extreme challenges, like homelessness, brushes with the law, or early parenthood.
“What ends up happening is that the student doesn’t get what they need and the volunteer burns out,” she says. Thread’s solution gives the student more people working on his or her behalf and correspondingly lightens the load for each mentor.
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“When you go to pick up a kid for school and that kid yells at you and cusses you out and you don’t have anyone to call, that’s a real isolating moment,” says Ms. Hemminger — one Thread’s buddy-system structure is designed to guard against.
‘We’re Annoying’
For more than a decade, Thread has collected data on the students it serves. One piece of data that correlated most strongly to success for its kids: the number of “touch points,” or contacts, between a student and volunteers.
To track that key metric, the charity built a mobile app that allows volunteers to log each time they encounter their student. Supervisors can also log in to keep track of who’s getting attention and who needs more.
Once enrolled, students are in the program for 10 years, no matter what, which Ms. Hemminger says is “probably the single most important thing that we do.”
How many kids have tried to drop out of Thread? “Every kid,” she deadpans. “We’re annoying. We show up on your doorstep. We want to take you to school.”
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In addition to persistence, building meaningful relationships between mentors and students is crucial. The students are encouraged to ask tough questions of their own, and mentors are encouraged to be open and honest.
Says Ms. Hemminger, “You ask a kid, ‘Have you ever used drugs?’ And they look back at you — ‘Have you ever used drugs?’ And I’ll bet a higher percentage of our volunteers have used them than our students have.”
Family Togetherness
Today, Braxton Ryan, a skinny, somber 18-year-old, is a high-school graduate, working at a hotel, looking forward to college, and grateful for Thread. But as a freshman at the Academy for College and Career Exploration, a public Baltimore high school, he played class clown. He felt stress at home, where his single mom took care of him and his younger sister, who has cerebral palsy.
Five years ago, Desiree Herrera, now 23, was a freshman at Johns Hopkins, studying psychology. A recent transplant from New Jersey, she signed on to help mentor a struggling Baltimore high-school student as a way to fight her own isolation and homesickness.
The recruiter warned volunteers of the dysfunction they were likely to encounter: students with drug problems, criminal records, or an attitude. But with Braxton, she says, “I got very lucky. He’s awesome.”
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Teamed with two other young mentors, Ms. Herrera helped Braxton in a number of ways: driving him places; helping him cash a check; accompanying him to a soup kitchen to help rack up the volunteer hours Maryland students need to graduate.
The reliability of his Thread family proved the turning point, Mr. Ryan says. After failing a class in the 11th grade, throwing on-time graduation into doubt, he went to summer school and earned his degree on time, playing two sports as a senior and earning good grades.
We’re annoying. We show up on your doorstep. We want to take you to school.
Today, he says, he’s ready to shoulder the responsibility of taking care of his mother and sister, something he’ll be doing “for probably the rest of my life. I have to be prepared for that.” He wants to study business and fashion design in college.
Erica Weems, 22, now a student at the University of Baltimore, was recruited for Thread in 2010 as a freshman at Dunbar, lured by the free pizza at the first meeting. Her transition from middle school was proving difficult — though, as she wryly recalls, “maybe I could have done the work if I’d gone to class.”
She embraced the program right away, but not without some nagging doubts, which she sums up as, “Who are these people, and why do they want the best for me?”
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Ms. Weems says the program’s holistic approach, extending beyond just academic achievement, kept her on board. Her volunteer mentors “really cared about me as a person, rather than a statistic or something they could benefit from,” she says.
For example, when she turned 16, her Thread family threw her a surprise party, her first ever. “It wasn’t just stuff that they threw together. They hand-made cupcakes; everything was pink,” her favorite color.
Smart Growth
Before Sarah Hemminger scales up her big idea, she wants to keep improving it.
“Without question, we want to grow to other cities,” she says. “But first we want to develop our model in a way that’s portable, so when we do export our model, it is actually successful and maintains quality.”
So, what does a full-scale Thread look like? Surprisingly modest — and breathtakingly ambitious.
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“We want to reach 7 percent of every freshman class in the school district,” she says — about 3,000 students. Reaching that goal would help boost Baltimore’s high-school graduation rates significantly, she says.
Ms. Goldstein, of the Weinberg foundation, approves. “It’s a smart growth plan. They don’t want to take on too much at a time.”
The 3,000 students Ms. Hemminger wants Thread to serve would require help from about 7,000 adult volunteers and staff. “Imagine if Teach for America hadn’t spread out, but gone deep in one city. You would have leadership galvanized at all levels,” she says.
More Money
Securing funding commitments for more paid staff — and staff with the right mix of skills — will be the key to whether Thread can grow to meet its goals and sustain itself over the long term, Ms. Hemminger says. The organization’s current annual budget is about $4.1 million, mostly raised from foundations. To serve 3,000 students, it would need to be at least a $13 million operation, and its current fundraising model can’t get it there, she says. One goal of the charity’s new strategic plan, set for release this fall, is to figure out how to tap other revenue streams, such as earned income and government support, while it continues to seek contributions from individuals, foundations, and corporations.
Mr. Embry, of the Abell Foundation, thinks donors, so often concerned about seeing the impact of their giving, would warm to Thread’s program. “All things being equal,” he says, “wouldn’t you rather intervene at [age] 14 and see the results at 18 than intervene at 1 and see the results 17 years later?”
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But the foundation leader also sees obstacles. “I think most people don’t want to deal with that population,” he says. “Assuming they care about poverty at all, which is a more basic question.”
Corrections: A previous version of this article referred to a TED talk instead of a TEDx talk. It also said Erica Weems was recruited in 2009 instead of 2010. And it gave incorrect figures for the percentage of freshman students the group wanted to reach, the number of volunteers required to work with them, the annual budget, and what the annual budget would have to be to serve 3,000 students.