Music and Youth creates accessible, sustainable, high quality music programs so every young person can experience the magic of music. They were founded to provide financial and operational resources to already effective, not-for-profit Youth Development Organizations in underserved communities, allowing them to offer after school music education to pre-teen and teenage youth (age 10-18). Their program, The Music Clubhouse provides instruction in guitar, keys, drums, bass, voice, beat making, and music recording. They partner with Boys & Girls Clubs, YMCA’s and other community based organizations who run the Music Clubhouse in the partner’s facility.

The Second Step fosters the safety, stability, and well-being of survivors of domestic violence. Their residential and community-based programs build on the strengths, needs, and values of the individuals and families they serve. The Second Step partners with survivors to address the aftermath of abuse and build brighter futures for themselves and their children. The Second Step also works to address the root causes of domestic violence and end it in our time.

Silver Lining Mentoring empowers youth in foster care to flourish through committed mentoring relationships and the development of essential life skills. Silver Lining Mentoring has three programs to serve foster youth in the state of Massachusetts that it has grown since its inception in 2001. They are the only Boston-area nonprofit that focuses exclusively on the unique needs of youth in foster care, engaging these youth to help them learn job and life skills and to improve their ability to set and achieve goals.

Bridge Over Troubled Waters’ mission is to enable high-risk, runaway and homeless youth to achieve healthy and productive adulthood through prevention, intervention, and education services. Serving 2,500 youth ages 14 to 24 each year, Bridge offers a comprehensive range of emergency drop-in services and overnight accommodations, health care, mental health counseling and risk-reduction, education and career development, and long-term transitional housing. Bridge is the only agency in the Boston area to provide a continuum of age-appropriate services for who are homeless and on the streets due to issues of abuse and neglect over which they have had no control.

GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders is a legal rights organization that seeks to end discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders’ bold and effective advocacy has achieved scores of precedent-setting legal victories to end discrimination based on sexual orientation, HIV status and gender identity and expression, benefiting individuals, couples and families across New England and throughout the United States since 1978. Examples include winning the right of same-sex couples to marry in Massachusetts and Connecticut; winning the right of second-parent adoption in Massachusetts and Maine; and winning the right of coverage under the Americans with Disabilities Act for all citizens with HIV infection.

InnerCity Weightlifting uses fitness training as a tool to reduce violence and promote achievement among young people at the highest risk for violence. ICW is an ambitious, young organization that dares to work with a population that society largely ignores and, in doing so, changes lives: not only those of SAP students, but of clients as well, allowing trainers and trainees alike to cross boundaries and learn from each other, gaining a deeper understanding of complex social issues and how they can become a part of the solution.

Did you know that through its Engineering is Elementary program BMOS is one of the largest producers of curriculum on science for school-aged children in the world? Neither did we. An extension of its EiE curriculum work for primary school children, it recently launched Engineering Adventures, an out-of-school engineering curriculum for use by the Girl Scouts/Boy Scouts, Girls and Boys’ Clubs and many, many other kids’ after school programs. The Engineering Adventures program further expands the BMOS push to ensure that underrepresented populations gain science and technological literacy – and learn the skills to ask questions, imagine, plan and create solutions to real-world problems. BMOS presents to SheGives on March 4, 2014.

BUILD teaches entrepreneurial skills to high-risk high school kids as a “hook” to get them engaged in high school and then ultimately on a college track. To date nationally 99% of BUILD seniors have graduated high school and been accepted to college — changing their life trajectories. Founded in Silicon Valley, they launched their four-year high school program in Boston public schools in 2011, which is anticipated to be BUILD’s first large pilot roll-out in order to prepare to scale nationally. BUILD presents information to SheGives about their program on January 8, 2014.

College Bound Dorchester is a groundbreaking college track program for some of the toughest-to-reach kids in a community where less than one-quarter of the population has a college degree. CBD’s staggeringly effective program identifies, engages and serves the most influential and disconnected youth in the most violent and dysfunctional neighborhoods around Dorchester. It believes that only by focusing on the small number of individuals who are the most disruptive forces in the neighborhood and getting them into college and on the path to success can they stop the systemic cycle of violence and poverty in Dorchester. And its program is working.

Lovin’ Spoonfuls is on the forefront of a national movement to address perishable food waste as an issue that raises environmental, economic, health and hunger issues. Did you know that decomposing food makes up a significant portion of landfills, which costs us a ton of money, emits methane, a gas that is believed to have has a potent effect on global climate change and — obviously — doesn’t feed the hungry? Since Ashley Stanley founded Lovin’ Spoonfuls in 2010, it has moved more than 786,00 pounds of good, healthy food from from top restaurants and grocers around town to the homeless and needy. Ashley Stanley presents information to SheGives about her simple, powerful program on October 21, 2013 at Myers+Chang in the South End, one of LS’s partners.

My Life My Choice is a nationally recognized, groundbreaking initiative designed to reach adolescent girls most vulnerable to commercial sexual trafficking. MLMC provides a unique continuum of prevention, victim identification, and intervention services. Through a program that trains survivors of commercial sexual exploitation to mentor girls who are in (or vulnerable to) the sex trade, since 2002, MLMC has mentored over 150 girls involved in the sex trade. It has also trained school nurses, bus drivers, hotel staff, members of the police force, hospital workers and others who work in positions likely to encounter young girls who are being controlled by pimps on how to see the signs of prostitution, how to interact with the girls and who to contact to safely assist the girls. MLMC presents to SheGives on April 29, 2014.

RAW Art Works, an art therapy space and gallery, uses art to ignite creativity and inspire confidence for kids in Lynn’s economically struggling and largely working class immigrant population. Using a wide range of media from paint to film, kids create art that speaks up. RAW’s clinical art therapists and professional artists build meaningful relationships with each kid, helping them see a broader and healthier palette of life choices. They challenge them to change negative patterns while giving unrelenting support to reach what may seem unattainable. Famous for its innovative film school, its teens produced films that screened at 11 film festivals around the U.S. and won two national awards. RAW’s project launch helps send over 90% of RAW’s seniors into college.

Science Club for Girls produces free breakthrough kindergarten through 12th grade out-of-school programming in science, technology, math and engineering skills to low-income girls in the Boston area. Science Club has taught grade school girls how to determine the viscosity of yogurt and how to use chocolate to determine the wavelength of light. Its team of teenage rocket girls have qualified for and competed in the America Rocketry Challenge. Through its extensive, imaginative and fun programming, Science Club is aiming to close the representation gap for women in STEM.

TeachPlus :: T3 Initiative puts teams of high performing teachers into the most desperately failing public schools around Boston. A provocative approach that sidesteps entrenched structures, the T3 Initiative is an innovative program designed by teachers that recruits, develops, and supports effective, experienced teachers to serve as teams of turnaround specialists in the Boston area’s worst performing schools. Why does the T3 program work? Because research shows that no school-based factor is more important for a student’s success in school than the teacher in front of that child’s classroom.