Community Outreach
Reaching students in need within our community has been the primary goal of Empower CNY since its founding. In effort to support as many different groups as possible, Empower CNY has partnered with a variety of local organizations which actively seek out and connect with students in need across CNY.
Much of our work focuses on refugee & immigrant youth. The Central New York region is located at the intersection of multiple sanctuary cities (Syracuse, Ithaca, Albany, NYC), where many many immigrants find refuge. Our ties to this community have shown us that promoting civic engagement within the education of these students can improve their educational outcomes remarkably.
Empower CNY has partnered with organizations like RISE (Refugee and Immigrant Self-Empowerment), Sakhi, and the Vietnamese Community Center (VCC), all of which are working for the advancement of immigrant & refugee youth. At the VCC we hold in-person tutoring sessions for the first-generation Vietnamese community in Syracuse. Our tutors help the students with their homework, or any subject they are struggling on. Through RISE, our volunteers help run free educational programming for recently settled refugees in the Syracuse area. Our partners at Sakhi have allowed us to work with children of South Asian women facing oppression in NYC.
We have also met with other organizations within our community for leadership insight and utilization of their platforms to spread our mission. Some of these include the Syracuse University STEP (Science and Technology Entry Program), Project Fibonacci Foundation (PFF), and the Onondaga County Public Libraries (OCPL). STEP and PFF have established organizations within the CNY community, whose leadership teams aided us in the early stages of designing our leadership structure. Moreover, many of our in-person tutoring efforts take place at free community rooms provided by Onondaga County Public Libraries.
Active outreach within our community is the only way that Empower CNY can achieve its goal of reaching every student in need within the CNY area. We are continually developing new methods to reach previously disconnected communities. Currently, we are working on distributing informational pamphlets on our program through the Madison County Youth Bureau.
