Technology company and non-profit partner to help low-income area youths

Two Howard County-based organizations have partnered to help underprivileged youths in the area, with delicious results.

The U.S. Dream Academy, a Columbia non-profit, and ANCILE Solutions, an Elkridge company, hosted their first educational session Wednesday, July 27 at the company's offices, where students learned about different steps in the business process — with the help of dozens of pre-made brownies.

About 30 third- through fifth-graders from Pimlico Elementary School in Baltimore County split into teams to develop, test, market and sell brownies with various toppings in order to learn how ANCILE develops and sells software. The idea, said Marianna Noll, ANCILE's director of marketing and communications, was to give the students an idea of what the technology company does. This ties into one of the larger goals of the non-profit, said Yvonne McNair, the center director at Pimlico: dream-building and career-building.

"They see drug dealers and they see the football and basketball players, but we're cultivating the attitude of having a career," McNair said. "We try to get children introduced to the idea of having a career, to get them out of their neighborhoods."

During the school year, 60 students at Pimlico Elementary and Middle Schools participate in the U.S. Dream Academy, which has been headquartered in Columbia for 13 years. Students are pooled from the school, McNair said, and are identified for falling behind academically, or for having an incarcerated parent.

Unique to the non-profit, which has centers across the country, is the one-on-one mentoring offered by volunteers, said Angela Hunt Bonitto of Columbia, director of development for U.S. Dream Academy.

"We try to create a mirror of what a two-parent family would look like by providing an adult mentor," she said. "You're helping children coming from an area where there is no help to them."

Bonitto said such students are often described as lost causes, but that's not true.

"They might not have the typical bells and whistles of other children, but they want to learn and they care," she said. "They just want and need attention. If they see you consistently, they know you care, and it's gratifying to watch them grow and flourish."

McNair noted that the first student to graduate from the Pimlico Dream Academy is now studying forensic science in college. Typically, Bonitto said, students arrive at the academy two years below grade level. After a year in the program, they're at grade level or only one below, she said.

"If they have the right tools, they can succeed," Bonitto said.