Welcome to Building Futures!  Building Futures is a tutoring and mentoring program for English as a Second Language (ESL) middle and high school students.  Our program pairs volunteers from the community with individual students to work on reading and English for one hour a week. 

Immigrant and refugee students face many complicated barriers in learning English.  In order to help these students achieve the same success as their peers, Kentucky Refugee Ministries, the Louisville Office for International Affairs, and Jefferson County Public Schools partnered to form the ESL tutoring and mentoring program, Building Futures.  This program serves as the ESL arm of the district-wide initiative Every1Reads, which aims to have every student reading at grade level by 2008.

During the 2005-06 academic year, Building Futures served over 100 students with the help of more than 100 volunteers.  Students represented 21 different nationalities, including, but not limited to: Albania, Bolivia, China, Congo, Cuba, Guatemala, El Salvador, Jordan, Liberia, Mexico, Philippines, Russia, Sierre Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Vietnam, and Yemen.

Building Futures also offers monthly mentoring activities for students and volunteers, including field trips, service learning activities, and educational workshops.

Find out how you can get involved!