ELI Incubator Initiative, ASPIRE, Awarded Fellowship.
Hart Leadership would like to congratulate the ELI Incubator team ASPIRE on receiving a Youth Venture Fellowship to support the development of its games-based after school enrichment program in Durham, NC. Youth Venture, a global program of the Ashoka Foundation, works to inspire and invest in teams of young people that are designing and launching their own lasting social ventures. Youth Venture helps youth through the process of designing and launching their ventures, providing guidance, how-to’s, and a process for designing and pitching a venture idea.
ASPIRE (After School Programs Involving Recreational Enrichment) is an initiative envisioned by Alexandra MacLeish and Grace Zhou, two students in Tony Brown’s PPS144s Social Entrepreneurship in Action course, fall 2010. The program seeks to reinforce positive social skills and behaviors in elementary aged children through recreational games. The program piloted in Spring 2011 with twenty 4th and 5th grade students at E.K. Powe Elementary School in Durham has now scaled to serve forty 2nd through 5th grade students at E.K. Powe in addition to students participating in programming at Durham’s Lyon Park Community Center.