Mentor 2 Youth‘s new director Darryl Johnson and his team used quarantine as a chance to reflect on their Ypsilanti-based nonprofit’s mission to close the racial and class opportunity gap through community collaboration, parent involvement, and youth programs that help develop civic, financial, academic, and emotional intelligence.

“One of the things that this virtual period showed us is that we are too dependent on the physical experience of working with kids,” Johnson says. So rather than waiting for schools to ask for help with a student, they’ve developed new virtual programs such as the Parent Village, offering Mentor 2 Youth-developed curriculum, tutors, and more. Johnson thinks that proactive community-wide efforts will not only have a greater impact on the home environment for kids, but will also help build organization amongst the parents so that they can act as an entity to address underlying gaps in the community.