We work with school administration and staff to ensure safety and support guidelines are developed for our instructors in advance of beginning services so that our team can intentionally work to develop relationships rooted in trust and transparency with site staff and students. Our instructors undergo 35+ hours of onboarding training focused on safety, classroom, management, and programming instruction. Our staff also maintains compliance with first aid, CPR certification, and additional professional development throughout their employment to better support student health and wellbeing in the classroom.

Our DIY programs offer an expansive portfolio of hands-on, project-based learning activities that students get to plan, personalize, and collaborate on to assemble a finished product. Students engage in visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning modalities throughout our programs, ensuring all students have an opportunity to achieve, explore, think critically, and exercise their creativity.

As more skilled trades workers retire from the workforce, practical life skills taught in our DIY programs such as learning how to use a hammer, screwdriver, measuring tape, planning, and designing will equip students with 21st-century skills to create more career pathway opportunities for them in the future. Each DIY lesson plan has specific skill-building objectives that students will need to use and master to complete their projects.

Student feedback fuels our program development and innovation. We provide frequent opportunities for students in all grade levels to share their interests and preferences for how we can improve their experience in our DIY programs. Many of our new project and programming innovation initiatives have been developed as a direct response to student suggestions and feedback.

We actively recruit and commit to developing and retaining diverse staff from the local communities in which they will work with students to ensure our instructors create an inclusive environment for students in class. We additionally hire bilingual instructors and have various lesson plan modifications available to accommodate students across learning styles and ability levels.

We can't boast enough about our instructional staff. We hire role models, and we invest the time and resources to help our instructors develop the necessary program expertise and classroom management skills to deliver our DIY programs safely and effectively. As a testament to our staff quality, we frequently receive specific requests for our staff from site leads and students alike because of the positive relationships that they've taken the time to cultivate in their work. We additionally promote a culture of continuous improvements across our team and have built in structured opportunities for performance feedback and evaluation to retain and grow our high-quality instructional staff members.

Each quarter, we seek opportunities to collaborate with partners in the communities we serve to create awareness, gather feedback, and meet members of the community to share our programs’ available resources. Aside from the partnerships that we seek to develop and nurture with school administration, we also welcome partnerships and frequently seek to collaborate with other enrichment providers serving the same sites to enhance the overall quality of the afterschool program and the students’ experience.

Our instructional staff engage in frequent self-assessments and peer assessments to help each team member grow professionally and personally. We also seek daily feedback from staff members to identify any key pain points or patterns in classrooms so that we can diagnose the root causes and make lasting changes that improve the overall quality of our programming. We are always eager for our administrative partners' feedback on how we can improve our service delivery, and frequently make adjustments or customizations to meet their needs.