OUR MISSION

Mission: The Phoenix Project was founded in 2017 at Murrow High School, located in Brooklyn, New York. It’s mission is to empower students by unpacking their obstacles/barriers, including the effects of internalizing negative messages via discrimination against their social identity, and exploring methods, resources and systems to augment their motivation and unlock their ultimate potential.

 Vision: Ensure all students in our country actualize their potential and are given opportunities to overcome adversities in their lives so that they can optimize their growth, academic success, self-determine and manifest their aspirations.

 Synopsis: The Phoenix Project model takes students with low performance mathematics levels (mostly 1s and 2s out of 4) on standardized state exams and integrates many aspects of their lives, enhancing academic performance by using a holistic approach that is trauma informed and culturally relevant in practice. The most prominent feature of the Phoenix model has been to create a room with a safe space/study lounge where it serves as two functions. Students who have experienced trauma in their lives, including but not limited to transgenerational trauma from racism/discrimination and/or abuse/neglect and/or immigration, in addition to having anxiety and a hatred for mathematics begin to heal from their past/current traumas and associate a mathematics room with comfort, peace and joy, rendering new neuropathways necessary for them to learn a subject deemed anathema by many. The statistics on the first Phoenix cohort have shown that this philosophy and model work.