Our Services

The long-term goal of New Orleans Outreach is to develop a model for bringing volunteer-based programming into schools that actually helps make schools better. Outreach staff work with principals, parents, teachers, and students to identify the needs and improvement goals of each particular school and then to craft and implement volunteer-based programs in response to those needs and goals. This strategically responsive model directly serves students and provides a variety of volunteer opportunities for community members. At the same time, it plays a significant role in school reform, particularly in a city with under-resourced public schools such as New Orleans. New Orleans Outreach targets children attending public schools in Orleans Parish. The students range from 5 to 18 years old and live all over the city. Schools are selected based on their need for resources and their staffs commitment to improve their students education. The students we currently serve are 95% African-American and 96% qualify for free or reduced lunch.

Programs/Volunteer Opportunities

Specifically, Outreach staff has been able to respond the variety of needs identified by host school personnel by developing the following volunteer-based programs:

Afterschool electives: Students are able to choose from a variety of classes, ranging from horticulture to medicine and from chess to basketball.
Tutoring: Volunteers come during the school day and after school to provide one-on-one tutoring to students, with particular focus on fourth and eighth grade students preparing for the LEAP test.
Teacher assistants: These volunteers help reduce the student/teacher ratio in classes and get a taste of what teaching is like.
Parent Support Teams: Schools identify a variety of ways in which parents can help: chaperoning field trips, monitoring the yard in the morning, assisting teachers in the classroom, serving as reading tutors, and decorating the school.
Power Ties: This job skills and career awareness program links professionals from various occupations with students through job skills workshops, a career fair, job site visits, and vacation internships.
Reading Programs: Parents, college students, and community volunteers serve as reading tutors in literacy programs at elementary school sites.
Interschool activity days: These activity days bring together students from the host schools with students from nearby private schools.
Special programming: Outreach staff coordinates a variety of seminars, workshops, and programs at each site based on special requests from the schools and various interests of volunteers. Examples of these programs range from a finance seminar taught by employees from a local bank to a series of girls' health awareness workshops for sixth graders taught by graduate students from Tulane School of Public Health.
21st Century Community Learning Center Collaborative Partners: Through a cooperative agreement with the state of Louisiana, four school sites receive services from paid partner organizations including YA/YA (a visual arts organization), STAIR (a reading program for 2nd graders), KID smART (multi-disciplinary arts education) and others. Outreach manages this collaborative.

The diversity of programming is matched by the diversity of volunteers. Parents, grandparents, college and high school students, business professionals, public servants, artists, and other interested community members volunteer through Outreach in order to help improve public education. A full-time school outreach coordinator develops and coordinates these activities at each school, where they ultimately become woven into the school culture.