Facilitating Leadership in Youth, an AU club that tutors and builds relationships with youth from the Barry Farms Public Housing Community in Anacostia, D.C., will see its first two students graduate from high school this spring.
Three AU students volunteering in Anacostia started the club in the late 1990s after forming relationships with the area's youth. A non-profit organization later formed to fund the club, Sunny Shin, the club's president and a senior in the School of International Service, said.
Now, 30 to 40 AU students work with the club, either through tutoring or helping with its weekend programming. Every day of the week the club works to strengthen the academics and leadership of Barry Farms youth, according to Shin. Programs range from tutoring to building a community garden to more creative classes, like hip-hop. The kids can take classes at a summer camp held on AU's campus.
"The FLY club is the neatest group," Drew Smith, an intern for FLY and sophomore in SIS, said. "We really love what we do with FLY."
Shin said the relationships between the youth and AU students are an essential part of the program.
"We work through one-on-one relationships," Shin said. "We focus on developing relationships between the FLY youth and the AU students."
SG Comptroller-elect David Teslicko, head of FLY's summer camp program and a sophomore in SIS and the School of Public Affairs, said the relationships he has formed with the kids make the program extremely rewarding.
"It's about becoming a friend and a mentor," Teslicko said.
After being placed with FLY through the DC Reads program, Shin continued working with them because she didn't want to leave the kids.
"I really wanted to get to know kids outside of the academic setting," she said.
She said classes that exposed her to issues affecting minority groups were her motivation. Moments like playing chess with a sixth grader or getting hugs from the students continue to reaffirm her choice to work with the youth, Shin said.
Smith also pointed to the relationships he has developed with the kids as the main reason he loves FLY. As an educational advocate intern for FLY, he works with schools and kids three to four days a week.
Every Wednesday, he tutors a quiet and lovable fourth grader, he said. After a two-week break, the fourth grader ran up to Smith and gave him a hug.
"It meant more to me than anything," Smith said.
For the future of the program, Smith said he would love to see more of FLY's kids make the honor roll and apply to college.
Though graduating, Shin said she wants FLY to grow in the number and quality of its members.
"I want it to grow in committed and active membership, with people who really care about FLY," she said. "I want it to be the cool thing to do"
