Mission
EVkids empowers underserved Boston youth with the skills and confidence needed to realize their potential.
EVkids provides 1:1 skills-based mentoring and an intentional pipeline of access and opportunity, nurturing underserved Boston students to successfully graduate high school and college, become confident leaders, and attain generational security and wealth through education.
By building a caring community of support, where success is expected and achievable together, we believe our EVkids and their mentors will become integral parts of a more socially just and compassionate world.
History
EVkids is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, founded as “Earthen Vessels” in 1980 by Marie-Claude and Brian Thompson as a faith-based response to childhood poverty in Boston. Rooted in the Catholic tradition of social justice, the Thompsons began by bringing small groups of underserved Boston youth to Vermont each summer to spend two weeks at a time hiking, swimming, and learning to build a safe and supportive community together. In 1985, EVkids added a Boston-based tutoring and mentoring program during the school year to address the stark academic challenges faced by underserved children and teens in Boston. That first school year, EVkids matched eight Dorchester students 1-on-1 with college tutors recruited through the Harvard Catholic Center, and fostered a robust community of support through year-round family engagement and professional education advocacy.
EVkids Tutoring now provides academic mentoring at five afterschool sites in Dorchester and Roxbury, including a virtual site. Students, grades 3-12, are matched 1:1 with near-peer university student volunteers for weekly 90-minute sessions supervised by on-site staff. A tutor engagement team recruits, trains, and supports college student volunteers through multiple local campus partnerships, including at Boston College, Boston University, Harvard, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (MCPHS), Northeastern, Tufts, and UMass Boston.
College Success supports EVkids high school juniors and seniors with additional college and career readiness support, including financial aid workshops, college searches, campus visits, recommendation letters, scholarship and internship searches, and college application coaching. EVkids Tutoring graduates are then supported as they navigate their first-generation-in-college experience, most with 1:1 College Success mentors.
Summer Camp continues to provide EVkids students ages 12-18 with a 1-2 week screen-free camp experience at EVkids’ nine-acre Camp in Vermont, and EVkids college students with a summer employment opportunity. The EVkids Youth Council encourages student leadership and elevates youth voice, including student participation at the annual Board retreat.
The original name “Earthen Vessels” was inspired by scripture: “we hold this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing power may be of God and not from us.” (2 Corinthians 4:7) As co-founder Marie-Claude describes it, we are all like “earthen vessels,” that is, we are imperfect, fragile, perhaps unremarkable containers, but we are meant to be filled with light and love. For the children and youth who are tutored, this means academic achievement and personal empowerment for a bright future. For the college mentors, it means that they share their skills as best they can, and trust that the seeds they plant will sprout and bear fruit beyond them.
The holistic, relationship-based ethos of the organization continues to be at the heart of the service model. Students and tutors alike are surrounded with opportunities to be creative, to stretch themselves, to reflect on their experiences, and to be of service to others, humble and secure in the knowledge that they are important parts of a community that is greater than the sum of its parts. Together we strive to create a more socially just and compassionate world, one student, one camper, one mentor, one counselor at a time.
