WHAT IF THE DIFFERENCE YOU YEARN TO MAKE IS RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU?
In schools, Love Your City is the one-in-a-million after school cross-age mentoring program we call Velocity. Velocity is the kind of thing they make movies about. High school students become superheroes, serving as mentors to students from a neighboring middle school. As a result, everyone grows. Velocity is jaw dropping: It’s designed by mentoring expert, Dr. Michael Karcher. It has been implemented in three hurting high schools across the United States. Each time, 100% of students in the program have graduated from high school, and 95% have gone on to college. The Department of Justice even includes Velocity on its list of programs with promising practices.
Yet, what makes Velocity most extraordinary is the opportunity it provides for you to be a part of it. Join Velocity as a volunteer. Adopt a Velocity program for a school year as a business or church to grow your own leaders as they invest in students. Or even begin the conversation about starting a new Velocity where you live!
In neighborhoods, Love Your City attacks poverty at its roots: relational disconnection. It begins by gathering people who yearn to make a difference, some who give and some who go. After choosing a hurting neighborhood in the community, skilled team members lead a growing group of volunteers in to build relationships with every resident. From there, mentoring relationships and small groups form that help community members rise.
And then it happens: People grow and the neighborhood rises. But it doesn’t stop with a single neighborhood rising out of poverty. Love Your City creates a movement that spreads from one neighborhood to another. With each neighborhood, more and more volunteers, schools, churches, and businesses join in and a next generation of leaders are formed.
How can it be that we are all so busy and yet, very often, so equally empty? Our obsession with work leads to us being glued to our couches and televisions in search of recreation, leaving us disconnected from real relationships and further and further away from realizing our dreams. With each passing week and year, our hearts yearn more and more to actually live real lives that make a difference rather than watching them on Netflix.
Whether you are a young person, a business person or a leader within a church, Love Your City is both an invitation and a bridge into laying down the remote control and becoming the kind of person that other people watch movies about. Here are some of the ways that you can walk into your place within Love Your City:
