Dear Oui Tutor Community,
As we roll into the latter half of the 2023-2024 School Year, we wanted to share with you our accomplishments and milestones for this year.
We proudly saw phenomenal acceptance rates with our first graduating Seniors (class of 2023). Among the college acceptances were: Berkeley, Boston University, Baylor, Cal State Fullerton, Duke, Penn State, Princeton, UC Davis, UCI, UCLA, and Washington University of St. Louis. This group of young adults will continue to serve Oui Tutor in a newly formed Advisory Board for the organization.
We are proud to announce that we are formally a nonprofit tax-exempt organization classified under IRS section 501(c)(3). This significant milestone was accomplished under the leadership of our CFO Daniel Yoon, Venice Harrison, and Co-CEO Sara Farnoush. We are grateful for the guidance of our CPA Carolyn Bryant and our attorney Michael Fischer, CrossCourt Law. This status will allow us to grow our volunteer reach by partnering with high schools which require service hours with charitable, tax-exempt organizations.
We’ve continued our successful partnership with Vibrant Minds Academy, a TK-6th grade public charter school. Oui Tutor provides after-school, one-on-one learning on Zoom for up to 16 students a day, four days a week in coordination with the Vibrant Minds leadership team, and specifically Kla Cook. This year we were invited to the Back to School night, where we had the chance to meet the scholars in person, as well as their parents. In keeping with our mission to spread the French language, we hosted two French language classes for Vibrant Minds Students. Through an engaging arts and crafts activity, some of our most proficient board members built a curriculum that exposed students to their first encounter with French. Our team spent dedicated hours practicing the lesson and assembling example crafts.
In 2023 we donated 680 volunteer tutoring sessions. We now have over 30 trained tutors (and growing). We represent more than 10 high schools from all over Orange County and LA County. We provide over 50 tutoring sessions a week during the school year, though the demand is greater than we can accommodate.
In addition to Vibrant Minds, we continue to provide tutoring to the International School of Orange County in both French and English. This year, we have had an increase in requests for French-speaking tutors for ISOC. In June, we donated another $1,085 to the International School of Orange County from tutoring ISOC students during the school year.
We continue to build a sustainable internal structure by encouraging our most experienced tutors with 20 hours of tutoring or more, to step into leadership roles by serving on our all-teen Board of Trustees. Our Board meets weekly to work on running the organization and annually to review our mission, vision, and goals. This year we hosted a “College Application Tips” training for our Board, presented by Empower College Consulting.
As we move into 2024, we are excited to launch a pilot program in two high schools by introducing a “Oui Tutor Club,” which should allow us to grow organically and increase our tutor count. This initiative is being led by myself and Simone Aitken-Penn.
We are grateful to the parents who support the commitment made by their teens and we are grateful for the chance to serve our community. If you’d like to learn more about us, please visit our website at ouitutor.org, which is scheduled for an update courtesy of webmaster, Ernest Priestly. And, please, please follow us on Instagram @ouitutor. Our Instagram following is significant in building a social media presence to spread awareness about the tutoring opportunities we offer as we are in desperate need of more tutors.
Sincerely,
Yannis Agas, Board Chair on Behalf of the Oui Tutor Board
Santa Margarita Margarita High School, Class of 2024