September 25, 2023 | Harold Hare
Find Your Grind + Think Together
Find Your Grind Partners with California’s largest non-profit provider of expanded learning programs: Think Together
This fall, Find Your Grind is excited to partner with the renowned California afterschool program: Think Together. Think Together was founded 25 years ago from a need to provide a safe and welcoming place for children and youth to receive academic support.
For more than two decades, Think Together has worked alongside education leaders across California to grow their services. From their humble beginnings as a single afterschool center in Costa Mesa funded by the generosity of community leaders, they have now grown to be the state’s largest nonprofit provider of expanded learning programs, serving close to 200,000 students.
Think Together delivers nationally-recognized after-school programs, early learning, enrichment, and school improvement in 500 California schools from San Diego to San Francisco.
Here’s a little bit more about why Think Together chose to partner with Find Your Grind.
- Why was it important to bring a program like Find Your Grind to Think Together, and how does the program support your strategic vision?
Our mission at Think Together is to change the odds for kids, which is in alignment with what Find Your Grind does. We can leverage Find Your Grind’s experiential learning and exploration of career pathways to support and enhance our mission. - How do you plan on implementing Find Your Grind?
Find Your Grind will be deployed across all our high and middle school sites. For high school, we’ll sprinkle Find Your Grind throughout the whole school year. For middle school, students will dive into it during our second engagement cycle and use their learnings and takeaways to inform the third engagement cycle unit. - Did any core feature from Find Your Grind convince you to bring this program to your students?
We want students in our programs to open up their worldviews and see beyond the surface. Multiple features in Find Your Grind support this. However, identifying different lifestyles and their numerous career opportunities creates a more expansive vision of the future for our learners, aligning with our mission of changing the odds. - As an educational leader, what is the biggest challenge schools must overcome in preparing students for success in a rapidly changing world? How do you feel Find Your Grind can support you?
It’s hard to pinpoint one specific thing. Education is in a complex state today. Many students, particularly from marginalized backgrounds, are stripped of truly transformational learning experiences and opportunities to engage and question the world they live in. Find Your Grind can supplement the gaps by allowing students to think big, fantasize, and explore what success can look like for them while building a roadmap for materializing this. - Other programs that address similar topics to Find Your Grind are available. Beyond the core feature you highlighted earlier, was there anything specifically about Find Your Grind that stood out to you during your vetting process of products?
What really drew us and excited us about bringing Find Your Grind into our program was the alignment with our mission and the hands-on and comprehensive approach that Find Your Grind has.
