City Year Executive Director Looks To Expand Its Reach

Valencia Koker has been the Executive Director of City Year Chicago for two years. Photo provided by City Year Chicago.
Valencia Koker has been the Executive Director of City Year Chicago for two years. Photo provided by City Year Chicago.

City Year Executive Director Looks To Expand Its Reach

By Tia Carol Jones 

Valencia Koker has been the Executive Director of City Year Chicago for two years. She aspires to broaden the reach of the organization and double the number of schools it services.

Koker was first exposed to the work of City Year while she was a principal at a school on the city’s West side. As a young principal at 27 years old, she needed all the partnerships and resources she could find to achieve the level of success that was expected for student outcomes.

“I had a great experience with City Year adding capacity to the classrooms, really providing the necessary wraparound support to achieve the academic outcomes we aspired to,” she said.

Because of that first experience with City Year, Koker made sure that the organization was a key partner when she went on to another school. She said having City Year at those two schools was essential to her and her students’ success. When the opportunity came to work at City Year, she didn’t hesitate to take advantage of it.

City Year Chicago, which has been in Chicago for 31 years, deploys more than 250 AmeriCorps members to 32 schools to support thousands of students socially and academically throughout the city of Chicago. City Year’s volunteers are between the ages of 18 years old to 25 years old, who give a year or more of service to AmeriCorps to work in elementary and high schools.

Koker has been with City Year for three years. Prior to her being the Executive Director and Vice President, she was Managing Director of Impact for a year. She said corps members help schools with attendance initiatives and serve as near peer mentors to students.

She added that in cases where teachers might have 20 or more students and might not have the capacity to provide one-on-one support to each student, having another adult in the classroom for the whole school day has profound social emotional effects. She said having that tutor in the classroom for math and reading has had a positive impact on the students’ grades, as well as their readiness for standardized tests.

“We really pride ourselves on allowing students to rise to the occasion by creating the conditions for them to be successful,” she said.

She said that the corps members at City Year who wear red jackets and go into the schools focus on serving the students at the schools and the volunteers also receive development and support. Koker said that the team at City Year knows that support is essential for the corps members as they go out into the world.

“We know that shortly after their year of service, they will be contributors to the ecosystem to Chicago, or even nationally, so we’re making sure we’re spending time to provide them with the durable skills necessary to be successful and placing them on a pathway that’s closer to their desired career path,” she said.

Koker said that City Year is interested in expanding the program to other public and charter school options, as well as having an interest in exploring outside of the city, into the suburbs. Currently, City Year is at a school in Flossmoor, Ill. Koker said while City Year has been in Flossmoor, it has been learning the differences between serving in suburban schools and city schools. What they have found is that there are more similarities than differences. She said that students need to be served and with the right conditions the program will be successful.

For more information about City Year, visit cityyear.org/Chicago.

Latest Stories

Latest Podcast

STARR Community Services International, Inc.