Many little kids dream of growing up to change the world. Too many high schoolers think that childhood aspiration requires a fancy degree or large amounts of power, but a group of Quad City teens is proving that notion wrong.
Teens for Tomorrow, a youth philanthropy group, is creating waves of change through their donations of $10,000 to local nonprofits. Operated by the Quad Cities Community Foundation in Davenport, those apart of this organization are learning how to make their dreams of creating change a reality.
Program director Kelly Thompson described the program as “An opportunity for high schoolers from all over the Quad Cities to come together, to learn, [and] to take that next level in giving back to their community.”
Over the course of the school year, this group of about 20 high school students, 8 of them from Pleasant Valley, meets monthly to discuss different steps in their grant-making process; a grant is a sum of money given by an organization to another organization or nonprofit to fund the work done there.
Teens for Tomorrow divides $10,000 among grants to local nonprofits, which are decided upon through a long and thoughtful process. It begins in September with the teens identifying issues that are important to the community, and is followed by deep research throughout the year into each topic. The decisions are wrapped up in April with site visits to grant applicants.
Thompson believes the program is very beneficial to everyone involved. “It’s important to the members of Teens for Tomorrow because they’re getting to learn different things about their community and expand their perspectives and gain new skills,” she said. “But even more-so than that, it’s important for the community because we need leaders of all ages; we need to have the next generation of leaders know about their community.”
One of PV’s Teens for Tomorrow members, senior Margaret Huang, benefits from the program’s numerous advantages. “It enables and encourages young people to value the people in society and continually look for means of improvement,” she said, stressing the importance to her of making a real difference in her community.
The program is an integral part of the philanthropy work done in the Quad Cities, and, as Thompson and Huang testified to, is just as essential in the development of the teens involved. In the words of Thompson, “I think that the best way to allow people to prepare to be leaders in the future is to let them lead right now, and that is exactly what we do at Teens for Tomorrow.”
