The Chicago Youth Animators are a group of professionals from diverse ethnic, professional, and religious backgrounds who are interested in helping adolescents in Chicago schools develop the qualities and skills they will need to achieve their own life goals.

We use a virtues based curriculum to help students understand the importance of character.

The program incorporates reading aspects, character building exercises, sports, and community service projects, all combined to introduce students to virtues such as confidence, perseverance, and humility.

Our varied backgrounds allow us to provide guidance for students pursuing many different paths.  Our hope is to serve as mentors and role models as well as helping participants develop the firm foundation they will need in order to make decisions that will help them achieve their goals.

We began laying the groundwork in the fall of 2006.  A small group of us got together to discuss ways to more efficiently tap into the potential of today’s youth and set them on a path focused on high virtues and self-confidence.

Our first program was deployed at Frederick Douglass High School on the west side.  With the intention of focusing solely on a virtues-based curriculum, we were faced with the school’s desire to have us tailor our program to incorporate job skills.  Virtues and job skills most assuredly not being mutually exclusive, we thought this would be a good challenge and potential growth avenue for our organization.

We created a unique six week program to integrate virtues and self-growth with job skills and preparation.  The curriculum proved attractive to the students, and we were able to attract a consistent student base throughout the program.  However, the culmination of the six week program coincided with the end of the school year, and we decided to return to our original intention of focusing on youth and junior youth with a virtues based curriculum developed by professionals.

In the fall of 2007, we began a Saturday program at Reavis Math & Science Specialty School on the south side.  The junior high school students we were able to attract were part of the initial age group we had hoped to reach out to.  The first six week program was limited in attendance to only 20 kids, but was a remarkable success.

Since beginning at Reavis in the fall of 2007, we have maintained a consistent presence at the school with programs each semester. In the 2008-2009 school year we were chosen by Reavis to be the official Saturday program of the school as part of a larger grant awarded to the institution.

In the summer of 2009, we extended the program to the summer, moving beyond a school calendar schedule.