Project LEEP (Leadership Ensuring Educational Progress) serves youth ages 12 to 15 (or up to high school matriculation).

How It Works

The program is free to participating youth and operates from 2:00 pm to 5:30 pm during the school year and from 8:30 am to 5:30 pm in the summer as well as on days that CPS and/or charter schools are closed.  BBF provides van service to transport the children from school to the program site and from the site to home each day (given that the child lives within the boundaries of the North Lawndale community area). 

Launched in 2005, LEEP is BBF’s newest out-of-school time program and was developed in response to an identified need for programming targeted specifically to "tweens."  Approximately 30 youth ages 12 to 15 are currently served through LEEP.  As with our other out-of-school time programs, additional programming slots will be available with our move to the new BBF Community Center. 

Program Objectives

Program activities are delivered in support of LEEP’s primary objective, which is to prepare youth to meet successfully the academic and social demands of high school. This objective is grounded in a set of seven service delivery goals.  These goals are to:

• Provide a safe space for youth living in one of Chicago’s most imperiled neighborhoods;
• Partner with parents, teachers and the larger community in delivery of program services;
• Bolster academic achievement through rigorous group and one-to-one tutoring;
• Promote healthy physical, social emotional and ethical growth through a broad spectrum of age-appropriate program activities;
• Ensure parental involvement through the LEEP Parent Council;
• Encourage creativity and cultural awareness by providing regular access to cultural spaces; and
• Aid in the creation of networks of social capital through which youth can acquire and leverage the resources they will need to transition successfully into adulthood.

Programming

LEEP’s structure is innovative and is intended to attract the attention and retain the interest of pre and young teens.  The program schedule revolves around a set of Program Activity Modules that reflect our interest in intensifying development of cultural capital, addressing fundamental gaps in current public school curricula, and serving as a pathway to interactions with the larger community/community volunteers. 

Among the Activity Modules offered currently are Girls Who Wear Glasses (an evening book club for girls), The Lost Boys (an evening book club for boys), MADD Rhythms Tap Academy @ BBF (weekly tap dancing lessons), Journeys in Film (a foreign film appreciation and cultural awareness project), WORDmotor (monthly poetry workshops) and SCRATCH (monthly visits with and lessons from local DJs).