My Nonprofit Reviews

I have experienced ACE's power in many ways. As the volunteer tutor and mentor for ACE, I've known first-hand the myriad ways, large and small, ACE helps kids on a day to day basis – and the long-term opportunities ACE opens up by advocating for them and pointing the way to valuable resources. In turn, my relationship with kids I tutor and mentor has had a profound effect on my own vision and sense of my place in the world. Therence, my mentee, has in four years gone from speaking no English to being a Student Council Vice-President, an Honors Society member, and the recipient of eight college acceptances. Finally, as the director of the Assumption College Community Service-Learning Program, I've seen ACE serve as an ideal partner for many learning experiences for our own students.

My story with ACE begins with my role as a Director of Community Service-Learning at a local college. Out of more than 80 community partners, ACE always stood out as one of the most compelling – serving African refugees and other immigrants close the huge gap between themselves and native speakers of English in our school system. That alone is enough to draw my support and admiration, but ACE also provides a home for these kids, a community which affirms their African roots even as it helps the adapt to a new culture. The program has evolved in a variety of directions from its base in after-school programming; there is the Saturday program, Summer Reading, festivals, and a wide range of other activities. Most importantly for me, there's the Mentoring Program; I was lucky enough to be paired with Therence, and have seen ACE help him move from speaking no English to being a member of the Honor Society and vice-president of the Student Council in less than four years. He has expressed many times how much ACE has helped him get to where he is now – and in the process, ACE has blessed me as well. Meanwhile, I also still send Assumption College students there – and they come away singing its praises. I highly recommend ACE for anyone wishing to support it either financially or as a volunteer.

As Community Service Learning director at Assumption College, I’ve been sending students to African Community Education for almost a decade. They’ve always reported getting a lot out of the experience – in fact, several Assumption students have liked it so much, they wound up working at ACE after graduation.

My students’ experiences have been so positive that last year, when I was looking to pick a place for my own personal volunteer commitment, I chose ACE out of the more than 80 organizations our college works with. Some of my reasons had to do with the obvious things – the compelling needs of refugee children playing catch-up in a new school system, the warmth of the ACE community, and the high caliber of the people on the staff. But ACE also meets another important need – the need to learn new skills and new worlds outside the usual scope of my life. I’ve not only learned a lot about Africa and about refugees in Worcester, but also had to open my brain to academic subjects to which my brain has long been closed. The privilege of learning alongside the kids – and for that matter learning HOW to learn alongside them – has been an extraordinary blessing in my life. I'm eager to see what new things I learn this coming fall.

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