NATIONAL URBAN TECHNOLOGY CENTER INC
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Mission Statement
National Urban Technology Center, Inc. (Urban Tech) Mission Statement: 25 Years of Serving Disadvantaged Communities Urban Tech is a 501(c)(3) educational not-for-profit corporation founded in 1995 to level the playing field for disadvantaged and diverse communities through innovative uses of technology. Through a partnership with the Department of Justice, Urban Tech has established 500 computer-training centers in 50 states and has touched over one million people in under-resourced communities providing the digital literacy, social and emotional skills and financial education and empowerment required to succeed in the 21st century. In realizing the value of its model for low income, under-resourced communities, Urban Tech launched Youth Leadership Academy (YLA) in 2000 - an e-learning platform for building trust and respect, learning the value of reaching out and helping others, and enhancing social and emotional skills. Through the use of technology, Urban Tech has provided students with access to engaging curriculum to increase math and reading scores, attendance, and graduation rates among traditionally hard-to-reach students in disadvantaged minority communities. YLA has trained 600,000 students in 500 schools across the country, and raised math and reading scores in participating schools by over 40%.
About This Cause
The National Urban Technology Center (Urban Tech) is a social enterprise committed to changing the game in education through digital storytelling, critical thinking, and social-emotional learning. We create solutions for students that recognize their value to society, regardless of their social background, by providing an interactive curriculum that reflects the student’s personal experiences, ideas, and dreams. By utilizing animation, relatable language, popular music, and gamification, Urban Tech is able to engage students on an unprecedented level. Students who have used Urban Technology have demonstrated improvements when it comes to social skills, emotional and physical health, digital literacy, financial education, and a variety of other subjects. Our standards-based curriculum adapts to the needs of the students and prepares them for 21st-century careers while providing personal support to teachers and parents in an effort to improve student education. Our online Youth Leadership Academy modules, developed for children K-12, are engaging programs for students to develop social, emotional, and communication skills while building 21st-century digital literacy experience. We started 21 years ago in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and have since expanded across the nation. You can find out more about our initiative to bridge the digital divide in the links below. Since 1995, Urban Tech has been dedicated to bridging the digital divide and creating opportunities for success in disadvantaged communities. With its SEEDTECH Program, founded in 1995, Urban Tech focused on providing underrepresented populations living in poverty with the technology and leadership skills they needed to build better futures for themselves and their families. Through SEEDTECH, juvenile offenders transitioned from a life of crime to academic achievement and community service, and senior citizens became trainers in SEEDTECH centers to provide intergenerational support to young people. In 2000, Urban Tech launched the Youth Leadership Academy (YLA) to provide students in those same communities with social and emotional skills to improve personal growth and leadership. YLA has trained 600,000 students in afterschool programs through NYCHA, and in 500 schools across the country. An evaluation of YLA found a 26% increase in attendance rates, 46% increase in reading scores, 40% increase in math scores, and a 67% increase in graduation rates after introducing the curriculum, as well as increases in self-esteem, self-efficacy, and pro-social behaviors. Today, bullying presents a threat to the progress YLA represents. Last year, almost 160,000 students skipped school each day to avoid being bullied. Over three million students are bullied each year and face long-term mental and physical health problems as a result, including major depressive disorder, while students who bully are more likely than their peers to face academic challenges. Importantly, studies show that as many as 57% of incidents can be prevented by teaching bystanders to recognize bullying when it occurs and to prevent and intervene in the bullying cycle using restorative practices that include the whole community. To seize that opportunity and help parents, students, and teachers advocate for themselves and one another in the face of bullying and violence, we launched Dignity for All (DFA), a whole-school, research-based bullying prevention curriculum based in trauma-informed care. DFA provides the knowledge required to identify bullying; exercises in empathy and reflection to recognize the emotions and experiences of others, and to regulate one’s own emotions; and the tools to create restorative behavior practices for safe and supportive school communities. In 2018, we implemented DFA into its first pilot school in Brooklyn, NY. At the start of the school year, 63% of students indicated that they had been teased, lied about, or socially isolated. After completing the first phase of DFA, in only ten weeks’ time, reports of the same behavior had decreased to 29%. We aim to provide results like these for students across the nation.