African Community Education

ACE is a 501(c)(3) non-profit community-based organization that grew out of a 4-year old tutoring program run by medical students from University of Massachusetts. The students had created a program offering one-on-one tutoring/homework help for refugee children from Liberia as one of ACE's co-founders, Kaska Yawo was a Liberian refugee himself. Although the student initiative had expanded and began offering services to more children, they soon realized that occasional one-hour tutoring sessions, unfortunately, were not sufficient for facing the educational crisis faced by the refugee and immigrant population in Worcester. Many of the children that come to the ACE Program have had little or no formal English education at all prior to coming to the U.S., in part due to difficult situations in many of their home countries. Thus, we saw children who were upwards of 12 years old who had never been in a formal school setting but were being placed in the Worcester Public School system based on their age rather than their ability; and they were being expected to perform on the Massachusetts standardized test (MCAS) without the additional resources they would need. These children needed a lot more attention than the medical students' program could offer. As the need for a larger program became more obvious, several members of the Worcester African community joined efforts in hopes to address the problem. It was decided to create an organization whose sole purpose would be to serve children from ALL African countries, who are refugees/recent immigrants/children of immigrants, who are behind in school, and who want help with their studies.