Career Academy

The Career Academy Project consists of an advisory board of leaders across various career fields with a mission to promote access for underserved youth. The advisory board will work with Kids on Point (KOP), an intense year-round afterschool and summer program. KOP engages at-risk children from the start of their education careers and beyond. The Career Academy Project focuses on “the beyond” to expose students to local businesses, like MUSC and Boeing, by creating shadowing and internship opportunities. Through this program, students will gain knowledge, confidence, and self-esteem and have access to explore new and exciting career opportunities.

Specific actions will include the development of a business participant guide. The advisory board members will contact a network of potential people/business partners offering an opportunity to be a part of something that will benefit their business and the community in which they live and work. After the business guide has been developed, the KOP executive director will incorporate opportunities for students to visit participating firms with the intention of building a relationship and giving access to shadowing and internships. Intermittently, the board will work to bring business partners to the KOP facility for a career day as planned by the KOP executive director. Since KOP has been in existence for 10 years, they have graduated 5 students who are thriving in college or have gone into the workforce after graduating from high school. We will compare their post-graduation success in 2019 to the post-graduation success after the first year of executing our project.

To recap, the deliverables for this project are as follows: (1) put together a list of people/businesses to contact regarding potential mentorship/internship opportunities for students interested in certain career fields; and (2) assist KOP in scheduling five exposure opportunities for students during the summer session of 2020.