Early in his career at the Homewood Children’s Village, Walter Lewis (SCS 2011) learned something interesting about the high school students who participated in their afterschool program. Most teenagers who had 100 hours or more of engagement raised their grades by an entire point within a year and continued to improve beyond that. Those whose grades didn’t improve at first, but were putting in the time, showed acquisitions of soft skills and changes in their disposition toward school and life. Both of those shifts led to later academic improvement.
Lewis realized while digging deeper into this data that the successes surrounding 100 hours of engagement weren’t about participating in specific activities but were about devoting the time to form meaningful relationships. In those 100 hours, a young person could see “someone cares about me, someone wants me to succeed, someone believes in me,” said Lewis. It was a feeling Lewis knew well from the adults who invested in him as a teenager and young adult in Philadelphia.The Village, a nonprofit that serves children and their families in Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighbor- hood, has long operated on the importance of communities. “We’ve got this falsehood in our culture that says we’re supposed to do everything by ourselves,” said Lewis. “It’s just not real. It’s not how people really operate and not how people really succeed.”Seeing that communal ethos play out in quantifiable ways with teenage engagement, “helped shape the way that we deliver programs and deliver interventions,” said Lewis, now the Village’s president and chief executive officer.
