Project Rousseau empowers youth in communities in the greatest need.
Student Needs
We establish safe, stable and supportive one-to-one relationships between students and mentors. Our Student Needs team addresses challenges at home such as immigration challenges, housing insecurity, and hunger.
Academics
Our Academics pillar builds students' confidence and helps them develop effective study habits, which serve them in college and beyond. Students are encouraged to aim high, and also look beyond the curriculum.
Broadening Horizons
Our Broadening Horizons pillar exposes students to new experiences, environments, careers, people, and cultures. Broadening Horizons is crucial because it opens doors for our students that they didn’t even know existed.
Community Service
Community service has a hidden benefit in the form of a powerful realization: by having a profound impact on the lives of others, our students learn the extent to which they can have an equally profound impact on improving their own lives.
New York City’s Migrant Crisis
New York City is currently welcoming an unprecedented number of migrants and asylum seekers. Project Rousseau is at the forefront of the response. Project Rousseau is providing free full-scope legal representation for over 270 individuals and has provided non-legal support to over 1000 new arrivals.
International Exchanges
Project Rousseau maintains partnerships with multiple schools around the world, including in Japan, the UK, and Denmark. These allow us to extend our Broadening Horizons program abroad, enabling students with the desire but not the means to travel overseas and immerse themselves in a foreign environment. Recent partnerships include virtual collaboration with schools in Rwanda and Peru: it is our hope to organize student visits there in due course. We believe that international exchange is critical to developing a sensitive, mature multicultural awareness, and also greater confidence in collaborating with peers from a range of backgrounds: skills that will be crucial come college, and professional life later on. In this way, we hope that our students will thrive not only academically, but also socially, setting them up for success in all domains of life.
College Success
Project Rousseau believes that college enrollment represents not an ending, but a beginning. The processes of college - from class registration and financial aid to coursework management and internship applications - can often prove overwhelming for many first-generation students. Accordingly, following on from the academic support and Broadening Horizons opportunities we provide to our high school students preparing for college, we run a holistic ‘College Success’ program for our matriculated students. This includes, but is not limited to, academic mentoring, financial aid guidance, and career navigation as their time as college progresses. Our students currently thrive at many of the best universities in the country, such as Harvard, MIT, Columbia and Georgetown. .
Oceti Sakowin
The Oceti Sakowin includes some of the poorest counties in the USA. On Rosebud Indian Reservation, home of the Sicangu Lakota, 48% of people below half of the poverty line, and the suicide rate of young males, 200 per 100k, is the highest of any community in the world.
Project Rousseau facilitates an extensive mentorship program that pays community members to mentor youth across the Oceti Sakowin. We meet the fundamental needs of students while also providing enrichment and academic opportunities necessary to excel in higher education.
