DC SCORES

Our Mission
For people who believe in a well-rounded childhood, DC SCORES is the quality, team-based approach providing youth with the arts, athletics, and academics that will engage, enrich, and improve their lives. DC SCORES builds teams through after school programs for over 800 low-income DC youth at 27 schools by instilling self-expression, physical fitness, and a sense of community. DC SCORES accomplishes this in an innovative model combining poetry and spoken word, soccer, and service-learning year-round.

Our Model
DC SCORES uses the combination of soccer, poetry, and service-learning to  help increase a student’s level of physical fitness, school engagement, self-worth, and sense of belonging in his/her community. We hire and train motivated DC public school teachers to run the program, thus providing each student with direct access to a trusted mentor.

Our History
Julie Kennedy, a former teacher at Marie Reed Learning Center in Adams Morgan, invented this complementary combination of activities in 1994 when she began working with a group of 15 girls with little to do after school. Ms. Kennedy learned that the team-centered relationships built on the soccer field translated into poetry workshops, and the development of teamwork and leadership prepared students to act as agents of change in their communities through service-learning projects.

The program quickly expanded throughout DC, and in 1999 Kennedy began sites in Boston and Chicago, thus creating America SCORES, headquarters to programs in 14 cities across the United States: Atlanta, Bay Area, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New England, New York, Portland, St. Louis, Seattle, and Washington, DC.