Another successful year is in the books for MINDDRIVE, a Kansas City nonprofit that works with at-risk urban high schoolers to get them reengaged with their education.
Through two potential tracks—automotive design and contemporary communications—students who are deemed at-risk by their counselors and principals work with MINDDRIVE to exercise their skills in a way the traditional classroom might not.
“We’re in the process of figuring out what next year’s program is going to be like,” MINDDRIVE’s president Linda Buchner told SPN, mentioning that a driverless car might be a possibility. “We’re trying to be the ones pushing the envelope in terms of what’s possible for these kids to work on.”
For the 2013-2014 school year, MINDDRIVE worked with 46 students and more than 30 mentors as well as a few dozen students who worked in the manual tech lab doing body work and repairs on the students’ car. While students from 16 different schools participated in the program last year, Buchner says the group hopes to expand to Wyandotte County, Kan., for the coming school year.
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“(The program) helps students understand why they need to learn math, why they need to learn science, why it’s important to learn about history,” Buchner added. “It starts to make sense when they get involved in a project.”
Recently, the group also received a $25,000 grant from the World Domination Summit Foundation. The fund was established through the national conference of the same name and, using a portion of the conference revenue, awarded “real life scholarships” between $5,000 and $25,000 for the first time this year. Buchner attended the World Domination Summit for the first time last year and after hearing about the newly-established Foundation, knew it would be a good fit for the KC organization.
In the end, MINDDRIVE was one of three ventures to receive funding in the foundation’s first year, and will use the money to help support its year-end trip.
At the culmination of each school year, MINDDRIVE takes its students on the road trip of a lifetime. Last year, the students traveled to Washington D.C. with the “social media-powered” vehicle they built. This year, the MINDDRIVE group took a road trip to northern California where they visited the Googleplex—Google’s headquarters—Twitter’s offices and a number of others.
Buchner says the trips are a great opportunity for students to show off their hard work and learn about potential careers in the tech field they may have not previously considered.
“At the end of our program, we take the kids on a road trip with the car they’ve built,” she said. “It expands their vision of a future and gets them away from their home, their neighbor, from KC. Instead we take them to a different part of the country to share their success story with the car.”
But Buchner says another part of the trips are about showing the student that there’s life outside of what they know in Kansas City in a broader sense.
“I had one student who lives on the northeast side of KC tell me, ‘I’ve lived in the city my whole life and I’ve never been right in the middle of nature’” Buchner said. “She was totally inspired and deeply moved by being in the middle of the Redwood Forest.”
The next year of MINDDRIVE’s program is slated to begin in mid to late September.
Read more about MINDDRIVE through our previous coverage: “At-risk students’ electric car makes it from KC to D.C. on “social fuel.”
Credits: Photo from Flickr.
