My Nonprofit Reviews

YPIE cares deeply about its students and their families, its staff and the hundreds of volunteers who work with the organization. I have been one of those volunteers since 2010. YPIEnot only provides significant training to its volunteers, and offers constructive feedback as needed to make it a better experience for both the student and the volunteer. The people who run and work for YPIE are forward-thinking, hard working, caring and deeply devoted to creating opportunity for the students.

Beyond its broad effort to prepare our students for the multi-step and complex college application and financial aid processes, YPIE's leadership incorporates DEI into their mission, and they constantly question why they are doing what they do and how they can do their work better. Several years go they developed an afterschool program and turned it into one that not only provides needed academic supports, but challenges the students to learn more broadly about life's opportunities: our student get involved in and present science research at a competive level and have earned numerous accolades. Other students were guided to explore journalism and then developed their own news outlet: The Quaran-Times, while still others engaged in debate and photography among a variety of opportunties.

Students are nourished both academically and socially; when they go off to college they have been exposed to at least the basics of independent living. Introduced through our afterschool enrichment program, YPIE's staff guides students through a world that is unfamiliar to most of them and many of their families; often, these students are the first in their family to go to college, or are children of immigrants, or are immigrants themselves, and unfamiliar with the American college process. YPIE staff enagage students in discussions covering a range of topics intended to prepare students for life as a college student, including setting up and using a bank account, understanding the debate around "safe spaces", and knowing whom to reach out to, for academic or emotional support on campus. YPIE's work is all-encompassing and they carry out their mission effectively and efficiently.