Programs

Over our 18 year history, ACF has launched programs and studied them to identify best practices that could be replicated in urban areas. Our demonstration projects are local, incubator-modeled urban development endeavors that are designed to expand into future national best practices programs.  Using Philadelphia as our learning laboratory, every ACF program is designed to intervene in a social, educational or economic development challenge, make a difference, and generate a lesson.

Each program has four components: primary activity, community engagement, leadership development, and evaluation. For example, Project MARS (Motivating Achievement, Resiliency and Success) was developed and designed to identify retention strategies for at-risk children in middle grades in order to reduce high school dropout rates.  With the premise that acquiring coping skills and fostering resiliency improves a child’s academic success, we designed an after-school and summer enrichment, counseling and mentoring program that engaged parents, teachers and community, encouraged leadership from amongst these groups to get involved and we evaluated it to get best practices.

Currently, we are developing model projects to uncover best practices through the following programs: 

• Green jobs and sustainable development
• Youth development
• Economic development