Grace Church School's GO Project Helps At-Risk Children

The GO Project tutors academic subjects as well as art

	GO Project’s founders, Elinor Ratner and Cree Harland
	Volunteers help with tutoring and fundraising
	A student shows off his drawing

Each year as the holidays approach, many of us ponder ways we can give back. With the world’s financial markets continuing to free-fall, protests in the streets, and severe governmental budget cuts, the hardships feel particularly acute, especially in Lower Manhattan, where more than 41 percent of adult residents have less than a high school education. This makes the GO Project—a New York City nonprofit that provides academic assistance and social services to at-risk public schoolchildren who live downtown—more valuable than ever.

In October the GO Project launched a new Middle School Program, which provides continuing support to current GO students through eighth grade, an often-challenging time of transformation. “The purpose of the Middle School Program is to ensure that the gains made during the elementary years have a lasting impact,” says GO executive director Erica Ahdoot. “We have a strong belief that every single child has the potential to thrive when surrounded with the right level of support.”

Employing a holistic and multidisciplinary approach, GO educators, social workers, and skilled volunteers work with children in kindergarten through eighth grade, focusing on educational fundamentals, social enrichment programs, and emotional skill building. GO takes a proactive approach, believing that early intervention, before students fall behind in school, lose self-esteem, or become socially disengaged, is the key to children’s long-term success.

A Graceful Beginning
Two pioneering downtown mothers, Cree Harland and Elinor Ratner, founded GO in 1968 as the Grace Opportunity Project, with a $3,000 grant from philanthropist Brooke Astor. Ratner, whose children attended the highly regarded private Grace Church School in Greenwich Village, remembers the initial inspiration and challenges. “It occurred to me that the excellent facilities in our private school were not being used in the summer,” she says. “We proposed to the headmaster that we use the school and church facilities to start a remedial program for public schoolchildren on the Lower East Side who were having learning problems, kids projected as drop-outs.”

The program began with 15 children, two teachers from GCS, and Ratner’s own kids providing transportation to and from school in an old, beat-up station wagon. Harland, who was a member of the Vestry, recalls some of the other parishioners regarding GO as a risky experiment. “After the first few years these doubts disappeared,” she says. “Grace Church came to regard GO as a very important part of its outreach to a community that it had served since 1846.”

On the GO
The organization has flourished since its early days, adding specialists in social work, remedial education, psychology, art, and physical education. Until recently GO was staffed mostly by volunteers. These dedicated workers do everything from helping in the classrooms to raising desperately needed funds. With so many worthy causes in need of support, it is a testament to the organization that it garners the time and resources of women like Tara Rockefeller, Patricia Herrera Lansing, and Meredith Heithoff. They share the goal of helping to level the educational playing field for all children in New York City, especially given the recent budget cuts in public schools and the increasing disparity of income levels in downtown communities. “The staggeringly dire statistics would inspire anyone to give back,” says Michelle Andrews, who volunteered with GO for almost a decade and has served as cochair for seven years.

In 2011 enrollment grew from 350 students to 459, and services have expanded to include a rigorous seven-month Saturday program (in addition to the five-week summer curriculum) and four downtown independent school partners—GCS, Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School, Friends Seminary, and City & Country. Asserts Andrews, “We believe GO is uniquely positioned to support these children through their middle school years and guide placement into strong high schools.”