ST ANNAS EPISCOPAL CHURCH
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Mission Statement
Anna’s Place NOLA helps members of marginalized groups in New Orleans change the trajectory of their lives. Our mission is to promote healing and wholeness of body, mind, and spirit among residents in our service area by offering academic, cultural, and arts enrichment; holistic health care; and healthy lifestyle education. We disrupt cycles of poverty primarily through our after school education and arts programming, but after witnessing poverty rates and violent crime increase, we renovated a nearby building to expand our human service offerings to include an employment center, additional health resources, and social and cultural support hubs.
About This Cause
Anna’s Place NOLA is the mission arm of St. Anna’s Episcopal Church, a separate non religious entity operating under the same 501(c)3, aiding members of marginalized groups in New Orleans to change the trajectory of their lives. Anna’s Place NOLA is a place of peace where children realize their potential and families and the community are nurtured so that poverty and violence no longer make their home among us. Anna’s Place, located in the heart of Treme is a place of peace where children realize their potential and families and the community are nurtured so that poverty and violence no longer make their home among us. Anna’s Place includes an after-school program (ages 5-12), Developing Adolescents for Workforce Navigation (“DAWN”) program (ages 13-18), youth summer camp (age 5-18), food pantry, homeless outreach, and victims of violence support. Anna's Place NOLA offers several activities for Louisiana children at no cost including art therapy, music therapy, cultural dance classes, cultural/history classes, beat making/music production class, gardening, children’s choir, financial literacy, music instruction/ lessons (guitar, brass, drumming, and violin), coding and robotics classes, yoga, tutoring, field trip, and homework help. The student surveys show: 100% felt academically supported, 90% felt satisfied with the programs offered, and 78% liked school more since joining Anna’s Place NOLA. One of our various partnerships is with Loyola University New Orleans and we conduct field trips to the campus for various activities including going to their environment, biology, and chemistry departments to give our students hands-on experience and instruction. Our middle school students love our classes but most of them are particularly moved by the experiences from our field trips. About a third of our community members don’t have a high school diploma, so many of our students are the first in their families to set foot on a college campus. We also have partnerships with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, the local Opera, and local museums which students and parents have stated gives them an entirely different world view and idea of life that they would not have access to without the program. In addition to our youth program, we also have a food pantry that gives low income families groceries, a free tele-med clinic through Ochsner, job help, and financial literacy classes at our facility. The IXL and ABC mouse platforms will be used to access and evaluate the literacy program throughout its progression. The platforms consistently track educational gains weekly. Analytics from the platform will be monitored by an education specialist who will be working with students for additional support during their literacy sessions. Anna's Place's program is built around “the Whole Child approach” to education stemming from various studies and initiatives by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). We subscribe to the research-based tenets that students should have healthy, physically and emotionally safe environments to learn healthy lifestyle choices, receive support from qualified professionals and an engaged community, and are challenged to academically and personally succeed as citizens in a global environment. Our staff consistently researches, engages, and stays involved with the dialogue surrounding afterschool programs and uses surveys and research to improve programs. Each weekday has a different schedule for our four groups so they become familiar with A/B day schedules and transitioning to other classes similar to high school. We provide transportation from school to our facility and students go to their scheduled classes or “study hall” for a 45 minute block period before going to their next classroom. They have 3 classes a day and we serve them dinner before bringing them home. We use high rated academic software such as IXL to give students a personalized tutoring experience based on their needs. Software and surveys shows our students experience 30% average improvement in spelling and reading comprehension in addition to a 40-75% improvement in STEM. We use pre/post tests and data driven software to help ascertain our students’ skill levels and provide practice and tutoring time to get them on level. Despite many of our students attending underperforming schools throughout their entire K-12 career, 100% of our students graduate high school and outperform their peers at school.