Background of Youth Discovery Inc

Latino Youth Advancement

Over the last 6 years Youth Discovery Inc has been developing and implementing programs to encourage Latino youth to raise their sights as to what they can achieve in the American society, and teaching them how to achieve it.  We estimate that we have influenced over 7000 Latino youth to reach for this fuller life, especially through higher education. In addition we have helped Latino youth to obtain over $156,000 in scholarships to universities that they otherwise did not know how to apply. Thus, our goal is to motivate and enable Latino and other minority youth to achieve their full potential. One way that Latino youth will more likely achieve their full potential is finishing high school and go on to college. So far, in these 6 years, we estimate that through the programs we’ve supported, that we have had an influence with these 7000 Latino youth, to be more motivated to graduate and enroll in college. There’s a lot more we could write on the path YDI has taken over the years.

Read some of it in the document “Why YDI?” More of the story of YDI is incorporated in the Programs we sponsored, discussed in the document “Programs of YDI.” Five years ago we sponsored the first Latino Discovery class, similar but smaller in scope than our Self-Discovery Class, in Mountain Crest High School, in Hyrum, UT which has successfully motivated hundreds of Latino Youth to reach higher goals.  Ultimately, when the Self-Discovery Class starts rolling, we hope to be influencing hundreds of thousands of youth per year, if not millions. So really, we’re just getting started!

Click here to download a brochure outlining our philosophy, purpose, and programs. Our students have made great strides in being motivated to stretch themselves to much greater limits that they thought possible:

      Four page copy of Brochure printable on 8 ½ X 11 paper.  

     Two Sided, four fold copy of Brochure printable on  8 ½ X 14 paper.

Two of our students wrote testimonials of the effect of our programs on their lives. That Student Story testimonial of one or our programs, the Bilingual Youth Corps can be read here.

One of the largest impediments for Latino youth in going to higher education is money. YDI sponsored programs in which high school youth could compete for University Scholarships from YDI through the internet.. Besides the scholarships we provided, we taught multiple students how to apply for not only government scholarships, but also for private scholarships, for which there are many that never get applied. Our mantra to them is: If you spend 25 hours applying to get a $1000 scholarship you just made $40 per hour, whereas if you worked at a fast food restaurant you might make $7.5 per hour. Which is the most productive?

Youth Discovery provides seminars on applying for Federal Government Scholarships. These are available to all documented students, and yet most students either don’t know about them or don’t know how to apply. (Student councilors tell them to apply but don’t have time to walk them through the process.) 

As we said above, we have helped students obtain over $156,000 in student scholarships. Many students do not know how to apply for these scholarships and so we are presenting the methods here:

We were awarded 6 VISTA volunteers who worked for over 3 years with high school students to encourage them to raise their self-expectation. One entertaining result was the video called Define You which is quite illuminating. We shared these VISTA volunteers with an organization in Orem, UT, Latinos in Action, LIA, and during those 3 years their program expanded from 8 high schools to 103. With an average of about 30 students per class, and sometimes multiple classes per school, we increased their enrollment by about 3000. LIA boasts that 100 percent of their students graduate from high school and 85% go on to college. This is about an increase of 2500 Latino students in college.

Our Challenge defines in different words somewhat of what you may have already read in some of the other pages on this site. In it you’ll see that we are open to the suggestions of many of you and your associates.

Under Our Partners you’ll see most of the other organizations with whom we have worked.

See our Board of Directors and Heads of Various Campaigns of the Diversity Initiative here.

We have made a lot of progress in the last 7 years, since 2008, but we have just begun. We fully intend that the Self-Discovery Class will be implemented in nearly every high school and middle school throughout the United States. Thus, our goal is to dramatically increase the enrollment in higher education, and thus the life satisfaction, of millions of Latino and minority youth. We invite you to join us in this exciting journey!

Carlos B. Roundy, Ph.D.

President

Youth Discovery Inc

Copyright © Youth Discovery Inc 2016, All Rights Reserved