I've been an employee with Think Together for 12 years and developed a career pathway from a Site Leader to a Director. I've developed my skills, built knowledge, and have been given opportunities to grow my career. I've been inspired to return to school and continue my career with an organization that strives to develop staff who are passionate about changing the odds for kids.
I volunteered at THINK Together a lot of times to help kids with homework and do extracurricular activities and I loved it!! The kids were wonderful and goofy as well. Thanks to THINK Together I got an award certificate and a check for buying my college books! It was an amazing experience volunteering there.
THINK Together is a nonprofit dedicated to helping children through early literacy programs, after school programs, youth development, and tutoring. Over 5,000 people throughout California volunteered to help kids. THINK Together also partners with local school districts and communities to help facilitate youth and parent summits as well.Volunteer opportunities include everything from office work to hands on tutoring and mentoring children.The Volunteer department is well organized and eager to assist potential volunteers.
THINK Together is a phenomenal organization that is redefining after-school programs in Southern California. They are not an after-school program that will baby-sit your children, but instead will provide additional hours of tutoring and mentoring in order to help your child succeed in school. THINK Together is partnering with more and more schools each year and is expanding their services at an outstanding rate due to their proven track record in improving test scores at their partner schools. Further, with schools continually facing budget cuts and being required to do more with less, THINK Together uses state funded grants as we as private donations to educate and improve the lives in the next generation of after-school students.
A bit of a misrepresentation is presented in the 2008 Form 990. On page 24, where a description of the program is required, the following is indicated among its 'noteworthy accomplishments: "received funding and local agreement to establish after school programs in the following year at all 44 elementary, middle, and intermediate schools in the Santa Ana Unified School District, California's seventh largest school district." The misrepresentation comes in that the District itself had procured the funding from the State through its own grantwriting-not through Think Together. Think Together was introduced to the district as a manager of those State funds-not as the provider of funds to the District. Moreover, after school programs have existed within the district previous to Think Together's involvement, some dating back at least 8 years (see elementary schools like Harvey and Diamond). The statement that "students in THINK Together's programs realized significantly greater growth in their CST (California's Standards Test) scores than their peers who did not participate in THINK Together's programs," also misrepresents the influence of THINK Together given the scores referred to are from after school programs within the district previous to the involvement of Think Together. In fact, it would be impossible to substantiate such a claim given that the CST scores of Spring 2008 precede the takeover of district after school programs by Think Together in the Fall of 2008. In sum, although Think Together is running the after school programs in Santa Ana, it did not procure the grants from which it runs the programs, and it is not responsible for the test score improvement. It is simply a financial manager.