Since 1965, Midtown Educational Foundation (MEF) has operated through the Metro Achievement Center for girls and the Midtown Center for boys. Programs serve mainly Hispanic and African American youth, from low-income households offering after-school and summertime growth opportunities for roughly 1,000 students annually. In partnership with the John Templeton Foundation, MEF will enhance our overall language, practice, and shared understanding of character and virtue development. To enact this plan, MEF will develop and deliver a robust character training curriculum for staff, volunteers, and parents.
• 4th-6th grade Walgreens One-on-One Program (ONE): Primarily focused on the performance virtues, the ONE program emphasizes for young students the important character strengths needed to be successful young adults, particularly self-control and perseverance.
• 7th-8th grade Metro-Midtown Achievement Program (MAP): Our middle school program supports middle school students in their development and encourages conversations about intellectual character strengths.
• 9th-12th grade College Orientation Program (COP): This program introduces students to the moral and civic virtues such as moral courage and forgiveness as they prepare to transition to post-secondary education.
Through this project, MEF seeks to create a stronger culture of virtue and character development by not only focusing on character and virtue development for its students but also their families as well as MEF's staff and volunteers. In working to instill virtuous behavior in the groups that support MEF's students, we hypothesize that our students will only benefit more from the consistency of the culture at MEF's centers. MEF's staff and volunteers will also learn and more strongly pursue lives of character and virtue in their work in the program and in their lives beyond.
