This summer, we are raising funds to give high-performing Black and African-descent students in Newark access to something many of them have never had before: a safe, joyful, academically rigorous summer program built specifically for their brilliance.

Your donation directly helps us cover the essentials that make this possible:

$25 helps provide daily snacks, water, and classroom supplies.

$50 helps cover breakfast, lunch materials, and science experiment supplies.

$100 helps provide books, journals, debate materials, garden supplies, and “magic” materials.

$200 helps fund first aid, heat-safety supplies, and emergency preparedness.

$350 helps provide high-powered misting fans so students can safely learn outdoors during hot summer days.

$500 helps give students essential access to a porta-potty, ensuring bathroom ease, dignity, and safety during the program.

$1,000 helps fund the full “joy and magic” — games, simulations, themed weeks, celebrations, student leadership materials, and unforgettable learning experiences.

PROVE Institute is a tech-free space where children can be children — playing, gardening, creating, debating, experimenting, laughing, and building friendships — while also feeding their deep hunger for knowledge.

PROVE Institute is designed to offer the rigor of a strong academic program and the fun of an exciting summer camp.

Students will be treated as world leaders. Across the summer, they will build nations, solve problems, debate policies, conduct research, grow food, and use their voices to shape a better world. Their learning will include heavy argumentative writing, structured discussion, reciprocal teaching, collaboration, independent research, science experiments connected to fields like public health, daily community gardening, and service-based learning.

Every part of the program is intentionally designed. Our curriculum and activities are grounded in neuroscience, developmental psychology, culturally responsive pedagogy, reciprocal learning, and research on how children learn best. Even the joy is purposeful: the games, chants, simulations, experiments, and traditions are designed to strengthen memory, confidence, leadership, collaboration, and love of learning.

These students are not being forced to care about learning. They already do! These are children who beg to learn high-level math, science, and reading during their breaks! These are children who cry when research presentations have to stop because they are so proud to share what they discovered! They have curiousity and a deep hunger for knowledge. These amazing scholars have the brilliance!

What they need is access.

Your donation helps remove the barriers that too often keep Black children in historically underserved communities from the same high-level, joyful learning opportunities available to children with more resources.

When you give to PROVE Institute, you are helping fund more than a summer program.

You are helping fund safety!

You are helping fund joy!

You are helping fund rigorous learning!

You are helping fund childhood wonder!

You are helping fund a place where Newark students are seen as scholars, leaders, creators, researchers, and world-builders.

You are helping students “PROVE” — and improve — their thinking.

And most importantly, you are helping them experience the kind of summer every child deserves.