Dear Oui Tutor Community,

As we roll into the latter half of the 2024-2025 school year, we wanted to share with you our accomplishments and milestones for this year.

We proudly saw phenomenal acceptance rates with our second class of graduating seniors (class of 2024). Among the college acceptances were: Oxford, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Northeastern, Belmont University, Bowdoin College, Savannah College of Art and Design, UC Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Cruz, University of Minnesota, University of Pennsylvania, University of Utah, Vassar University, and Williams College. 

We are also continuing our Advisory Board program– a chance for our alumni to continue to serve Oui Tutor in a mentor capacity. Two members, Alexandre Caballero and Ransom Hatzenbuhler, pitched a potential partnership between our organization and the District Interact Rotary. Moreover, Alexandre Caballero has stepped into a larger role at Oui Tutor as a permanent adult mentor. 

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. 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, spearheaded by Venice Harrison, built a curriculum that exposed students to their first encounter with French. 

In 2024, we donated 895 volunteer tutoring sessions. We now have 40 trained tutors (and growing). We represent more than 10 high schools from all over Orange County, LA County, and Texas.  We provide over 70 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 $1,590 to the International School of Orange County thanks to contributions made by parents from tutoring ISOC students during the school year, the most we’ve ever donated.

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. This year, we hosted our first ever social, allowing us to meet our team of tutors in person for the first time. This included team bonding games and an open invite for prospective tutors. We continued this initiative by hosting a second event in September and are currently planning our 2025 Board retreat. 

Co-CEO Sara Farnoush led the initiative for Oui Tutor to attend its first ever Youth Entrepreneurship Fair, as hosted by Sandbox Synergy. This was an opportunity for us to reach a larger audience and a different side of our community. As a sponsor, we had an informational booth with games and prizes at the event, where around 200 to 300 shoppers stopped by. As a result, our social media follower count increased, and we had prospective tutors sign up. 

In 2024 we recognized co-CEO Simone Aitken-Penn, who individually contributed an inspiring 100 tutoring sessions through her dedicated three years with Oui Tutor. Simone also led an initiative to implement Oui Tutor Clubs, which allow us to grow organically and increase our tutor count. Both Canyon High School in Anaheim and Damien High School in La Verne are launching pilot programs.

As we move into 2025, we are excited to announce the development of our Oui Tutor ebook spearheaded by William Kerr and Sophie Semaan. Publication is expected sometime in 2025.

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

For updates about upcoming events and to support us, 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 always looking to expand our tutoring team.

 

Sincerely,

Sara Farnoush and Simone Aitken-Penn, Co-CEOs on Behalf of the Oui Tutor Board

Foothill High School and Canyon High School, Class of 2025

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