YOUTH DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATION INC

YDO puts Lawrence youth—as young as 8 and as old as 18+—on pathways to success. We deliver rigorous year-round academic enrichment and leadership development opportunities, focused on STEM and the arts and delivered free of charge. Not a drop-in center, we offer more than just one-off afterschool and summer classes. YDO engages with youth consistently, coupling our flagship programs with consistent mentoring and support, including need-based transportation to and from our programs and those of our community partners. YDO Kids develop skills and confidence, through challenging, semester-long courses that build on one another and on their interests and talents.
Every year, more of these students are growing into high school and college students with considerable talents and skills to share. By design, we position these students to see themselves as leaders, to step into teaching and mentorship positions at YDO, and to become role models for their peers and younger YDO students. Visible in the community and in their fields of interest, our young leaders are gaining the confidence and experiences that are attractive on a college application, impressive on a resume, and critical in a career. At the same time, their contributions of time and talent are helping to sustain YDO and support our impact.

YDO Kids hunger for a stable community committed to helping them succeed over time. So, we develop intentional pathways for them through YDO's programs. We wrap our offerings with consistent, individualized support to ensure students' long-term persistence. Our goal is to move each student through the five stages on the “YDO Pathway:” 1. The Hook: We begin by matching a student's strengths, talents, and passions with a YDO program(s). 2. Exploration: YDO invites students to broaden and deepen their exposure to STEM and the arts, with a range of offerings. 3. Buy-In: When students demonstrate a commitment to long-term participation, we invest in them, providing tailored support and opportunities for achievement. 4. Leadership: As skills develop, we challenge students to step into teaching, mentoring, and/or management roles within YDO. 5. The World: YDO Kids graduate from our program equipped with a vision for their future and a resume and network to fuel success.

Integral to understanding YDO’s unique approach is an appreciation for what we do NOT offer. We are not a drop-in center, providing a place to simply hang out. We are not a daycare, where families send children after school and over summers. We deliver curricula with courses that build on one another and on students’ skills. When young people are at YDO, they are constructing, questioning, creating, collaborating, problem solving, designing, and leading.

We also recognize that so many of our YDO Kids face chronic barriers to success, so we prioritize the elimination of two: cost and transportation. All of our afterschool and summer enrichment programming is absolutely free to Lawrence youth, and there are no fees for class materials, field trips, etc. In addition, student transportation is fundamental to our mission; we maintain a fleet of passenger vans, a director of transportation, and drivers who work year round. For a nominal fee of $15/week (waived if necessary), our students receive unlimited transportation to/from YDO/school/partners. Approximately two-thirds of participants rely on us over the course of the year to transport them from YDO to home at night after our classes; to/from their schools to our program; and to our partner programs (e.g., in Lawrence, Boston, Cambridge, Andover).

Since its founding, YDO has been committed to maximizing its own impact and that of other local organizations. If another youth program in, for example, Lawrence, Cambridge, or Boston can offer a unique learning opportunity to our students, we build a partnership and provide YDO Kids with transportation and ongoing support to ensure they make the most of that program. YDO then remains focused on what it does best—providing multiple levels of academic enrichment and intensive personal guidance. Over the years, we have found no special activity or curriculum that, in isolation, propels a student toward success. What has been effective is a combination of long-term mentoring along with frequent points of engagement, term after term, year after year. This engagement is begun and maintained through YDO's flagship programs, which are designed to keep meeting students’ needs, building their skills, and developing their leadership abilities from elementary school through high school and beyond.

We use a variety of annual programs as the “hook” to put Lawrence youth on paths to long-term success. In our Arts Clubs, students explore creative interests (e.g., dance, photography, musical theater), and older students get experience as teachers leading these groups. In our Science Academy, semester classes (e.g., Coding, Lego Robotics, Astronomy, Sports Statistics, Math Games), which are often taught by older YDO Kids, are designed to augment school-based learning, ignite interest and build confidence in introductory STEM subjects, and prepare students for advanced courses. When ready, YDO Kids transition to our STEM Design Lab. With multi-disciplinary, project-based semester classes (e.g., Halloween Animatronics, Toy Engineering, Motorized Machines, Advanced Coding, Physics Playground), students develop from first-time experimenters to self-directed innovators, master technical skills, and gain exposure to STEM careers. Through YDO@Phillips Academy, we take Lawrence elementary school students onto campus at Phillips Academy for 15 weeks of enrichment over the course of each academic year. YDO's partnership with Phillips is our most enduring, and these classes are delivered by Phillips students on campus in Andover and include Chinese, Comic Book Design, Creative Writing, Dance, Debate and Public Speaking, and Math. Through YDO's newest program, Postsecondary Pathways, we are providing a team of Lawrence high school juniors and seniors with two years of intensive support in preparing for and navigating the college admissions and transition processes.

YDO was founded in 2006 by math tutor Howard Sticklor after he began working with motivated Lawrence youth, finding and designing ways to engage them, introduce them to each other, and connect them to the world outside of Lawrence. He started by establishing partnerships with organizations offering academic enrichment. Howard then removed two barriers to his students’ participation: access and transportation. He enrolled youth directly in these youth programs (e.g., Prep at Pingree, Andover Breadloaf Writing Leader Program at Phillips Academy, College for Kids at Northern Essex Community College) and then personally transported them from school/home and back again.

The number of youth recruited by Howard swelled as new funding partnerships allowed him to deepen YDO’s offerings. In 2013, this work began to rapidly accelerate when Howard hired YDO’s first executive director, Mark Kampert. With investments from generous local funders, Mark and he established program space in Lawrence’s iconic Everett Mill. For the first time, YDO had a “home base” with room to gather its community of young people and deliver to them in-house classes. That year, YDO Summer was also formally launched, and YDO hired 24 high school and college students—who had grown up in Howard’s program—to plan and run a five-week summer program for the younger YDO students. It was at this time that today’s YDO was “born,” as an organization coupling Howard’s deep commitment to personally supporting the success of each individual student over time with a slate of rigorous afterschool and summer programs designed to build students’ skills and confidence, delivered free to Lawrence youth.

Since that time, YDO has grown to become Lawrence’s premier provider of out-of-school enrichment, even with reduced capacity due to the pandemic, we served ~450 young people in the 2020/21 academic year, and this number will continue to grow. When measuring our success, we can point to the “things,” such as the breadth and depth of programming, the robust partnerships, and the state-of-the-art STEM facilities. But most importantly, together we have been building and growing this organization without compromising the spirit and culture that made the very first YDO Kids so successful. One of our students Denise (a seven-year YDO participant and current Posse Scholar at Hamilton College) eloquently described our impact by saying, “I think YDO is so important because it takes children that society doesn’t think are good enough and shows them that by believing in themselves they can be extraordinary.”