Diallo Grant

I was the manager of A Home Away From Homelessness (www.homeaway.org) for 8 years.

Homeaway is a family-style mentorship program for teens in shelters, consisting in 3 programs: The Beach House, The School House, and the College & Career Program. We provided wrap-around support, tutoring, life-skills, family education, and mentorship services to teens in shelters.

I started at homeaway as an Education Specialist, became an advocate and mentor for the kids, and ended up running the Beach House and School House programs, and designing and launching the College and Career Program.

While there, I took turns both directly leading and overseeing wrap-around support for the kids and their families, including providing recreational, and social education, including biking, rock climbing, skiing, surfing, sailing, river rafting, and camping. During the first summer of the pandemic, we led an outdoor bike camp where the students learned to fix bikes, and safely ride them both around San Francisco, and through Golden Gate park trails. We also organized cultural outings (eg. museums, the symphony, and poetry slams), and participated in art workshops (eg. creative writing and poetry classes, making your own pod-cast, jewelry making class, etc), teaching cultural fluency skills, and generally expanding the kids’ horizons along the way.

Below are some of my accomplishments while at Homeaway:

• Worked with GGNRA and the Parks Conservancy to introduce the kids to nature stewardship, and to youth development programs through the parks.
• Organized and participated in outdoor adventures, including camping, biking, skiing, surfing, rock climbing, survival skills, ropes courses, etc.
• Developed and led lessons, teaching a broad range of topics and skills, including:
• Organized and co-led a bike workshop where we taught the kids how to safely ride and repair bikes. Riding skills we taught included how to mount a bike, stop, turn, and fall, how to break, keep safe spacing from the bike in front of you, use hand signals, ride on streets, and ride on dirt trails. Repair skills we taught included how to adjust your seat, put a slipped chain back on, fix a flat, adjust and replace the brakes, calibrate a derailleur, etc.
• Taught life skills such as cooking, housekeeping, organizing, using a calendar, coordinating schedules with others, etc.
• Taught social fluency skills such as context-appropriate language and etiquette, table manners, how to introduce yourself, how to respectfully establish boundaries, and how to resolve conflicts in a mutually beneficial way
• Co-designed and led a building workshop for middle and high school students, where the students designed and used power tools to build various devices, including box cars, hovercrafts, and potato launchers.
• Taught math, history, science, writing, language acquisition, and ethics; both in group and 1-1 settings.
• Trained staff and students on conflict resolution: how to stay calm and solution-focused during conflicts, how to establish and navigate boundaries, repair relationships, and adapt to each other’s styles through respect and listening.
• Worked with a diverse set of parents from cultures around the globe. We helped them navigate bureaucracies, understand cultural differences, devise effective parenting strategies, and find ways to collaborate with our approach to whole-child development. We also found ways to communicate across different languages.
• Fostered a warm, collaborative program environment, promoting teamwork.
• Explained and advocated for our program, recruiting participants, staff, volunteers, funders, new resources, and partners with compatible missions.
• Developed training materials for new hires, and led the recruitment, training, and mentorship of new program staff.
• Oversaw property maintenance.