Mentorship Matters
Help us give a disadvantaged child a hand up. Change their world. This changes everything.
ABOUT US
Paying it Forward
Our founders, Austin Scee and Mike Gandy Auzenne, were matched in the Big Brothers Big Sisters (“BBBS”) program of Metro Atlanta in 1997. Mike went from the projects of Atlanta to Colgate to Wall Street to Harvard Business School, following in Austin’s footsteps. In 2017, when Mike returned to Atlanta after business school, they set out to build a scalable mentorship model to complement excellent programs like BBBS.
MISSION
Helping Disadvantaged Kids to Thrive
Nearly half a million children in Metro Atlanta live in communities with low or very low child well-being. Mentorship programs work, but traditional mentorship models can only serve a fraction of the kids who need a hand up, because one-to-one mentorship models are difficult to scale.
Our mission is to provide high quality mentorship at scale, serving more kids, more quickly.
We have grown from 15 kids in 2017 to over 100 in 2020. We have strong demand from parents and partners, and aim to serve 1,000 kids by the end of 2022.
VISION
building a Scalable Mentorship Model
Martial Arts gyms are generally run by practitioners who have dedicated their lives to teaching, and to a set of core values.
One Sensei or gym owner can mentor 40-60 scholarship kids at a time, and senseis work after school and on the weekends.
PowerUP can provide senseis and gym owners with marketing help and business tools to increase the number of paying students in addition to scholarship students.
Many gym owners have excess capacity, and lumpy businesses. A base of recurring revenue is highly attractive to them. We help our Senseis build sustainable businesses.
This virtuous cycle enables us to serve underprivileged kids, and support local businesses that create jobs.
HOW IT WORKS
Delivering Mentorship through Senseis
Private donors, schools, and communities provide money and other resources. Partners and schools refer scholarship candidates. PowerUP grants scholarships to underprivileged and at-risk kids. PowerUP recruits, trains and monitors a network of participating senseis. Senseis provide mentorship and martial arts training.
IMPACT
Change their world. This changes everything.
News
Mentorship Matters
Sensei Roundtable Discussion
PowerUP board directors Stéphan Donzé and Mike Auzenne recently sat down Zoom-style with our Senseis to talk about what martial arts has meant in their lives, and what they are teaching our kids. Each of our Senseis shared their story, and the common themes
PowerUP “Kicks” Off with LaAmistad
We are excited to add Richard Trammell to the PowerUP family as our second sensei. Richard is a 3x world champion in the art of Shidokan, and has been training kids and adults in Atlanta at Trammell Fitness and Martial Arts since 1999. Richard is mentoring 16 scholarship kids in partnership with LaAmistad.
PowerUP receives coverage from national youth-focused magazine, YouthToday.
At a martial arts gym in Atlanta, kids sit in a semicircle around their sensei. He talks to them about persistence, about trying their best and about managing their feelings.