Paris Cai initially wanted to start a peer tutoring club at her high school, Waterloo Collegiate Institute, but the strains the pandemic was putting on her staff made that impossible to achieve.
So instead, the 11th grader and her executive team of other high school students became Homework Hub Tutoring in a global online venture that now has 300 students and a similar number of volunteer tutors from as far away as Kenya, India and the Philippines among its grantees and sponsors.
“During the pandemic, my friends and I, now my team, realized that many students needed help with homework, help with their assignments, because at the time we were in this strange ‘virtual bar live’ learning pattern ‘which was quite difficult for some students, ”said Cai, founder and president of Homework Hub.
“At that point, I already wanted to help the community, many of my friends wanted to find a way to help during the pandemic and with that motivation, combined with the fact that we were still bored at home, we decided to do something,” she said.
A non-profit organization since the beginning of this year, Homework Hub offers free one-on-one tutoring for students in grades one through seven across the entire curriculum in eight-week blocks of 45-minute sessions per week. Students can sign up for help in up to three subjects at the same time, with French being the most requested subject.
They are paired with a high school student (who can log the hours for community service required to graduate) or tutors of college students who have a minimum GPA and have been vetted through the application and interview process.
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Cai will lead the club he had initially planned for his school this year, while the team also hopes to work with more school boards across the province to help students struggling to keep up after 18 months of interrupted education.
Before back to school, this summer Homework Hub partnered with Youth on the rise, and with a small donation from Costco, he provided some 250 backpacks full of school supplies to local refugees and low-income groups for distribution.
The center is also looking to add offerings for eighth graders and is launching a branch in New York City (it is already working with a school in the US state of Georgia). Cai hopes to have about 500 guardians in the fold by the end of this calendar year.
Cai and his family used to live in the United States and have moved frequently, which means he had an extensive and diffuse network to call, which has since been reinforced by word of mouth and team Instagram reach.
“This grew much faster than I think any of us expected when we started out,” says #HomeworkHub founder Paris Cai. #COVID # Tutoring
“This grew much faster than I think any of us expected when we started out,” he said in a video interview with National Observer of Canada.
“At first we had fun helping a couple of people, but once we started to see the numbers go up, seeing how many people really needed this, it was a huge demand in our community, so that’s when we started to take things. more seriously and reach more young people who would be willing to work with us. “
Morgan Sharp / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada National Observer
Reference-www.nationalobserver.com