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The ELITE Program

The Croom Foundation's mission is to provide equitable opportunities to under-exposed and underprivileged youth and teens in West and Central Alabama. 

Leader

Kevin Croom

Location

15th Street East Tuscaloosa, AL 35404

About the project

The ELITE Program aims to aid underprivileged students in becoming knowledgeable about post high school excellence through mentoring, life coaching and modeling.

Statistics show that in many of our Alabama counties, young minorities, particularly male, are more likely to end up in jail or dead by the age of 21 rather than attend and graduate an institution of higher learning. Our program strides to change this narrative by offering minorities an avenue to feel success, see success, and ultimately become successful. We teach our students that they are a product of their environment until their environment changes.

In order for this change to take place, these students need equitable opportunities to level the playing field. The ELITE Program levels that playing field, and as a result, our students can change their environment and become successful. Setting a higher standard, meeting goals and receiving scholarships for college, provides an example to younger generations allowing them the privilege to witness and share that they know someone who “made it out”. We provide quarterly ACT prep classes to students at no cost. 

The Steps

The Croom Foundation functions as a bridge to close the gap of under-exposed and/or underprivileged students that are willing to work hard and want to continue their education after high school, but may not have the support, financial means, or guidance to attain that goal. Through offering multiple resources, support and aid, our students are able to turn dreams into reality.

Some of the actions we take to close the gap are:

  • Taking students on college visits in various states
  • We cover all travel expenses including: lodging, gas and food while on college visits
  • We cover college application fees for our high school seniors applying for college
  • We cover college move in expenses from dormitory expenses to dormitory fees as well as furnishings and food 
  • We cover freshman items needed for class such as laptops, printers and other study material
  • We cover uniforms our students wear for college visits as well as travel duffel bags and travel backpacks
  • We cover financial literacy programs our seniors take their final semester of high school that teaches them money management for college
  • We cover The Writing Den expenses, a 2 day writing workshop that our junior and seniors take to fine tune their writing skills
  • We cover ACT Prep materials and ACT testing fees
  • We cover anger management counseling or family counseling that our students have the option to attend to better their home life and themselves
  • We cover the tuition cost for students we move to private schools to offset them dealing with certain bad influences that may hinder their learning process in a public school setting
  • We work with our parents and complete FAFSA forms for our seniors due to many of them being First Generation College Students
  • We work with our student athletes to make sure they are NCAA Clearinghouse Cleared to be able to play at the collegiate level

Why we‘re doing it

The Elite Program is motivated as a result of the increasing and overwhelming teen violence in the communities we serve. Many of the schools we work with have a low success rate of enrolled students transitioning into college.

We’ve become aware that this isn’t a result of students lacking the aspiration to attend college, rather a missed opportunity due to lack of support. Thus, The Elite Program was designed to provide additional resources to help these students achieve these attainable goals. Our objective is to seek out students that are rooted in underexposed backgrounds/communities lacking equitable resources to create post high school opportunities. Once awarded the opportunity to work with these students, the goal is to increase academic performance based on the previous academic calendar, while integrating an improvement in their perspective at home as well.

$1,500.00 / $1,500.00