ATHLETES UNITED FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE
740 15th St NW 3rd Floor, Washington, DC 20005 www.grassrootproject.org

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Organizations Filed Purposes: The Grassroot Project uses the power of sport and the platform of athlete role models to educate, inspire, and mobilize youth to lead healthy lives.

School & Community Based Health Education - School and Community-Based Health Education: The Grassroot Project partners with DC schools and community centers to provide health promotion and youth development programs each week throughout the academic year. In FY 2018, we offered two curricula---one on sexual health and one on physical and nutritional health, while piloting a mental health program for our 8th grade students. Our curricula utilize a youth development approach to health education, and our programs are facilitated by NCAA Division I student-athletes who are recruited and trained by our staff. Our innovative program model utilizes non-traditional health educators (NCAA student-athlete role models) and an interactive curriculum that fosters strong relationships and enables classrooms to openly discuss sensitive issues related to health and health equity. Our curriculum has been proven effective in reducing health disparities by a rigorous experimental study. During FY 2019, 409 students completed our programs. During FY 2019, we continued our two new programs from FY 2018-- (1) Grassroots Fam, a health communication workshop for the parents and caregivers of the students in our school-based programs, and (2) Grassroots Connect, an event focused on linking students and their families to clinical and social service providers related to the topics covered in our curricula. We saw continued success in both programs and have reached over 75 parents this year.

Evaluation & Communication of Research - Research and evaluation are core to The Grassroot Project's organizational culture. Our goal is to collect performance data (on outputs, outcomes, and processes) and to use this data to improve our programs. In addition to using data internally, we want to share our successes and failures with the broader public. We also want to engage with others to determine best practices for youth development and health education. In FY 2019, we imroved our comprehensive data management tool using the Salesforce.com platform. This system sends real-time reports to volunteers and teachers about the results of students' pre-program and post-program surveys, and it allows our staff and donors to see how The Grassroot Project is doing. In FY 2019, we attended a number of public health conferences and blogged about the impact of our work. We plan to continue building this area of our programming in the coming year.

Civic Engagement & Leadership Development - The Grassroot Project invests significantly in the development and growth of our NCAA student-athlete volunteers. Not only do we spend four full days training our athletes to be effective health educators, but we also place our student-athletes into internships, coach them on leading others, and offer networking opportunities for them. Our goal is that these activities will not only enable our athletes to be more effective facilitators of our programs, but might also encourage and equip them to pursue careers in public health, youth development, education, or social justice. In FY 2019, we continued and enhanced the "Master Trainers" program where eight student-athletes were chosen to undertake an intensive eight-week training on advanced facilitation, project management, social justice, and cultural competency. These Master Trainers are now playing a significant role in recruiting, training, evaluating, and supporting their peers to be effective health educators for The Grassroot Project.

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Data for this page was sourced from XML published by IRS (public 990 form dataset) from: https://s3.amazonaws.com/irs-form-990/202020799349300632_public.xml