Our Mission
First Tee — Oakland is a youth development organization that enables kids to build the strength of character that empowers them through a lifetime of new challenges. By seamlessly integrating the game of golf with a life skills curriculum, we create active learning experiences that build inner strength, self-confidence, and resilience that kids can carry to everything they do. We’re Building Game Changers through our junior golf program.
Our Programs
Our program will offer an after-school and summer program that introduces children and youth, ages 6-17, to the game of golf and helps them develop a set of “core values” and life skills along with a lifelong love of the sport. Through a progression of lessons, students develop nine core values — honesty, integrity, sportsmanship, respect, confidence, responsibility, perseverance, courtesy, and judgment. Each lesson of the Life Skills Experience program features a life skills component, a golf skills component, and a health component. Students explore various skills every week at the program through golfing games and activities and small group discussions. The curriculum has a comprehensive set of lesson plans that are differentiated based on the participants’ age, abilities, and developmental stage. Every lesson systematically builds upon prior lessons, which helps children develop mastery of the skills. As participants build their golf skills and demonstrate the core values, they graduate to progressively higher levels of the program. By seamlessly integrating the game of golf with character-building, we create learning experiences that help kids uncover their inner strength, self-confidence, and resilience that they can carry to everything they do.
Our target community is the underserved youth in Oakland, where 17% of the population lives below the poverty line, and 25% of children live in poverty (per recent census data). According to the most recent census data, the city of Oakland boasts a very diverse population with over 440,000 residents of which 27% are Hispanic, 24% African American (51% combined), 15% Asian and 28% White. Our primary sourcing pool will be Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) where the demographics stray from the City’s population. Forty four percent of the approximate 50,000 students in OUSD are Hispanic with 23% African American, nearly 70% of the student base. According to recent data (2019) from the State of California Dept of Education and OUSD, 72% of students are from families deemed socio-economically disadvantaged (defined as eligible for free/reduced price meals and/or parents/guardians are without a high school diploma). Our goal is to mirror the diversity of OUSD, striving for at least 70% of our students identifying as African American and Hispanic.
First Tee - Oakland will be offering 100 kids after-school sessions of the Life Skills Experience this year. The program will be hosted at Metropolitan Golf Links. First Tee Oakland will be contracting with a bus service to pick up the children at their school or youth development agency and bring them to the golf course and then back to their after-school program.
Leading our program are our trained coaches, who not only provide an introduction to junior golf and an opportunity to enhance golf skills, but they also create a safe, supportive, and empowering environment to help kids prepare for life ahead, including friendships, school, college and even their careers.
Our projected revenue target is $500,000 to support our programming needs. We are focused on building a sustainable fundraising model with multi-year commitments. Your funding will provide the critical seed money to support our efforts to launch our after-school programming in the Fall. Specifically, your funding will go towards general operations, staff/coaches, transportation, facilities cost, equipment and supplies.