Metro Detroit Youth Clubs

In 2020 Metro Detroit Youth Clubs opened the Senator Carl Levin & James Comer Club in Detroit Michigan. We operated five locations in Wayne Oakland & Macomb Counties. With more than 2,500 active members we provided daily after school programming focused on academic achievement mentoring health and wellness and civic engagement. In March 2020 COVID disrupted every community we served and we pivoted within 15 days and began delivering Club programs through Zoom and Google Meet. We focused on meeting the emerging mental health needs academic needs and the basic needs of our Club members and their families. In September 2020 we partnered with Honor Community Health a federally qualified health center FQHC to address their staffing crisis caused by COVID. We provided daily academic support for Honor's employees children so parents and guardians could work while their children attended school remotely from the Club. We provided daily transportation to and from the Club tutoring onsite supervision and support for the families. Throughout 2020 in response to impact of COVID we established weekly online programs reaching youth with an emphasis on social interaction and addressing the impact of isolation; academic support in the form of group tutoring; and we engaged our teens in regular social justice discussions resulting from the murder of George Floyd. We maintained weekly mentoring meetings with our community stakeholders that were supporting our Club teens. The Club also connected with families to address basic needs including food clothing and mental and physical health. We began the process of moving to a paperless process for membership applications and program documentation in an effort to enhance our data collection and strengthen our research and evaluation efforts.