ML - Michigan Avenue

2015 - Issue 5 - September

Michigan Avenue - Niche Media - Michigan Avenue magazine is a luxury lifestyle magazine centered around Chicago’s finest people, events, fashion, health & beauty, fine dining & more!

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teaching our kids the action steps it takes day in and day out to achieve. "I have a student, Deonte Tanner, [whom] I taught during his freshman year: single-parent family, about nine people living in the same house, didn't want anything to do with people. He almost got into some fights and was spending a bit of time on the streets—he could have gone either way at that point. We started to do the Embarc program, and he had very mixed results. He stuck through it, and by the time he became a senior, [he was] one of Harper High School's first Gates Millennium Scholars. He's at Marquette University, and he has started many of his own antiviolence marches; he's done a lot of work to feed the hungry and the homeless. Here's a person who had a lot of anger, and now he's committed his life to making the world a better place and becoming successful himself. I can't think of a more powerful story of how change can happen with a person based on their exposure, based on their experiences seeing the world. "We want the Embarc program to exist as proof of how education needs to evolve, and it needs to be something that is transcending the borders that are dividing us. As we continue to scale up and reach, hope- fully, 15 schools serving some 2,000 kids within Chicago, we are proving that experiential education needs to be integrated directly in every school. We've had interest from the Department of Education in Washington, DC, and they've mentioned that we should consider a national model, but a lot of our plans for right now are to be a Chicago program—and as we are doing our work, to let it speak for itself as a way that education should be done, and to hopefully have people replicate that." For more information, visit embarcchicago.org. MA from top: Khan leads students through a Whole Foods for a lesson on organics and healthy eating (here at the cheese counter); at 1871 for an introduction to Chicago's thriving start-up culture, including what it takes to launch a company. "The achievemenT gap is The resulT of a social gap ThaT needs inTervenTion." —imran khan photography by Christina noel photography PEOPLE Spirit of Generosity

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