About our Program
DREAM Alive’s Six-Year Programming
We are committed to building servant leaders by giving youth opportunities to discover their community, grow in character, and achieve their dreams.
3 Program Focuses.
CAREER-FOCUSED EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING
By exposing youth to career paths through programmatic and progressive activities over 6-years, youth will not only achieve academic goals of graduation but will excel to begin their career path. DREAM Alive believes that youth need to have realistic dreams of future careers in order for them to succeed in their education and future adult career journey.
DREAM Alive encourages all scholars to have a career path leading to college, military, trade, or career upon high school graduation.
MENTORING RELATIONSHIPS
Studies have shown that intentional mentoring time can lead to growth in both character development and leadership skills. For this reason DREAM Alive has created a Lunch Mentoring Program which pairs a DREAM Alive Scholar with a volunteer who we call, a DREAM Mentor.
These mentors, alongside our staff, offer over 250 hours of intentional time for each scholar, per year!
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
Along with our mentoring program, we spend time working on character development with our scholars. After school with the partnership of Butler University, we address character and build emotional intelligence (EQ) skills.
Research shows that individuals with strong EQ are more likely to succeed than those with high intelligence quotients or relevant experience.
MIDDLE SCHOOL PROGRAM
This is the foundation track of our program which offers a diverse range of community experiences to support our scholars as they discover their identity and the impact others and the community have on them. Partaking in experiential learning career field trips is the lifeblood of this program as they allow for our scholars to be exposed to a new career path at a partner organization at least twice per month. We also provide intentional character development lessons for our scholars to learn and develop strong EQ skills, community service days and fun field trips.
We currently provide programming at the following middle schools in Indianapolis: Arlington, Howe, Longfellow, Northwest and Paramount Englewood. If you’re a 7th or 8th grader at one of these schools, we encourage you to learn more!
HIGH SCHOOL PROGRAM
Our High School Program is available for any high school scholar who attended DREAM Alive as a 7th or 8th grader. We want to continue the relationships that we started in Middle School. Another great perk, regardless of which High School our scholars go to, we will follow them there. This program provides mentoring for each student with a heavy focus on career paths. This track offers an array of new experiences in the community that are intentionally developed around challenging our scholars to develop their leadership skills.
High schoolers have access to weekly meetings, monthly socials, college road trips and summer internships.Scholars also get the opportunity to be matched with a mentor in the local community so that they can learn and grow from a consistent adult relationship in their life.