The Stadium School Youth Dreamers
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Center Operation | The Director | Timeline
Each teenager will commit to working at the center a certain number of hours each week. They will be paid a small stipend for half of these hours and will earn service-learning hours towards graduation for the other half. Adult volunteers will get paid a small stipend for their hours. The director and janitor will get paid a set yearly salary. Finally, the Youth Dreamers who serve on the Board of Directors will each earn money which will be set aside for college. Not only will the youth center serve youth in the community, but it will also serve community members. We will host block parties, open houses, neighborhood clean-ups and other activities that bring youth and adults together in positive ways, such as the Interaction Festival on National Join Hands Day. About the Director
She created the Community Action elective course at the Stadium School in March 2001and has been working with the Youth Dreamers ever since. She bases most of her work on the Principles of Social Action as developed by the Centre for Social Action out of DuMontford University in England. She has attended numerous trainings with the Centre for Social Action, has done presentations about the Youth Dreamers at social action conferences, and is on an editorial team to produce a publication about teachers' experiences with social action in the classroom. She also serves on the board of Youth As Resources with three other teenage Youth Dreamers, and she is the president of the Stadium School Youth Dreamers, Inc. She is currently taking classes at The College of Notre Dame-Maryland to earn a certificate in Nonprofit Leadership and Management.
Timeline
We are currently working on the fourth step. We have purchased our house at 1430 Carswell St. from the Homestead United Methodist Church. We have enlisted the help of Penza Associates Architects to provide free architectural design, code review, and construction drawings. Students and board members are currently writing to corporations, foundations, and renovation experts for donations of money, in-kind materials, and in-kind labor in order to reduce the costs of the renovation. Renovations will soon begin! We have held one fabulous Demo Day and have another scheduled for September 16, 2006. In addition to YD and community volunteers and with many thanks to our YD friend Kate McShane, our house will be one of the community projects for the James W. Rouse Community Service Day on September 16th. We will complete an additional timeline for preparing the center for opening as we near that date. That will include components such as advertising the center, recruiting and training employees and volunteers, recruiting members (most of whom we have already had contact with through tutoring at the local elementary schools), setting up rooms, scheduling staff, creating a payroll system, scheduling classes (based on information gathered from surveys) and hiring teachers, continued fundraising, etc. Many of these components will be started while renovations are in progress.
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The center will have classes such as sewing, pottery, mosaics, art, cooking, and typing, to name just a few. We will house one site of the Algebra Project, which is a math tutoring program run by former Stadium School students.
At her former school, she worked with two groups of fifth graders who called themselves "The Legacy Club" and worked to improve their community by painting and mosaicing the school bathrooms, planting a garden across the street from the school, painting the school playground, storming City Hall to get trash cans for the community, painting boards to cover the windows of abandoned homes, and starting a recycling program in the school. 
1. Property selection and site control 
