Starting an Afterschool Program for Youths: A Quick Guide

After-school programs provide many benefits for youths, making them a staple activity for all sorts of organizations, from schools to parks and recreation centers to dance studios and more. You’ve likely realized this already, which is why you’re interested in starting an afterschool program for the children and teenagers of your community.

Establishing your organization’s very first after-school program takes time and effort. Luckily, we’re here to guide you through it. In this article, we’ll discuss the steps you need to take to get your afterschool program running.

Assess your community's needs.

An afterschool program needs to meet your community’s needs in some way, or families won’t feel compelled to enroll their children. Before you can establish what your program will look like, assess what your community will want from it.

Start by characterizing your audience. You can either look at your existing data or perform a data append to get the following information about your community:

• Demographics
• Employment status
• Household size
• Socioeconomic level
• Interests, skills, and hobbies

With this information in mind, ask yourself: What do these community members need? For example, if your community has a large population of single parents and guardians working full-time jobs, they may need someone to watch over their children after school, as they won’t be off work yet.

Then ask, How can our afterschool program support that? In the case of the example above, the answer is quite simple. Simply offer longer-duration afterschool programs so parents and guardians rest assured that their children are being looked after while they work and commute.

Set SMART goals.

Now that you know what your community needs and how your afterschool program can support that need, condense that information into a single goal that will serve as the foundation of your afterschool program.

For best results, we recommend using the SMART framework:

• Specific. What exactly do you want to achieve? Why is it important?
• Measurable. How will you know when the goal is achieved? What metrics or indicators will you use to evaluate your progress?

• Achievable. Is your goal realistic given your organization’s skills, knowledge, and resources?

• Relevant. Does this goal align with your organization’s broader objectives and long-term plans? Why is it important to your mission or vision?

• Time-bound. What is your deadline for achieving your goal and how will you ensure the goal is met within that timeframe?

For instance, let’s say that you’re a staff member of a Jewish community center. You’ve noticed that your community’s youth are struggling when it comes to standardized testing and getting accepted into colleges.

In that case, you might set a goal like this: We will offer afterschool programs focused on supporting our community’s students in their educational journey, mainly through tutoring. We will help students build the skills they need to thrive at school and improve their testing scores by at least one letter grade in one semester. Ultimately, this supports our goal of paving the way to college success for our community’s youths.

Develop a program plan.

Next, it’s time to develop a thorough plan for your program. It should include information on:

• Curriculum and activities. Your programs could focus on education, recreation, sports and physical activity, creative activities, and more.
• Schedule. Determine how long you’ll offer your afterschool programs during the year. Will you offer set activities per semester? How many hours after school will the program run for?

• Registration process and fees. Decide how much your afterschool programs will cost and what registration and payment will look like for families.

• Budget and funding. Establish how much funding you’ll need for your program and how you plan to obtain that funding. This could mean hosting fundraisers, applying for grants, soliciting corporate sponsorships, and more.

• Marketing plans. Consider how you’ll promote your programs to interested families. This could mean distributing flyers, sending email blasts, posting on social media, and more.

Another key consideration you might include in your plan is whether or not you intend to purchase software to support your afterschool programs. The right tools make management simple—CommunityPass recommends purchasing an all-in-one solution with plenty of features that will streamline and automate your processes.

Recruit and train staff.

Once everything else is established, you must recruit new staff members and train them to supervise and lead your afterschool programs. According to RealHR Solutions, these are a few of the top employee recruiting methods:

• Internal candidates. This is where you connect with existing employees and ask them if they would be interested in taking over additional responsibilities for your afterschool program.
• Employee referrals. Ask employees to refer your new roles to individuals in their networks who may be interested in the opportunities.

• Portals and career websites. Post job openings on existing portals and career websites to reach a higher volume of job seekers.

• Passive candidate sourcing. If your organization has the time or capacity to do so, proactively reaching out to potentially qualified individuals can lead you to top talent you might otherwise not have found.

After reviewing resumes, interviewing, and finally accepting staff members for your afterschool program, you must onboard and train them on your processes. Be sure to create a new hire handbook that they can refer to whenever they have questions or need support in their new roles.

If your organization is a school or community organization, you may also be able to tap into your pool of volunteers to staff your afterschool programs. Volunteers with specific skills may be happy to teach your programs to enrich the youth of your community. Other volunteers may be willing to lend their time to supervising independent activities or checking participants in and out of your program.

At this point, it’s time for you to go ahead and implement your afterschool program. Remain open-minded to feedback and stay adaptable—you may find that certain parts or activities within your programs work well, and others don’t. Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback from your community members. Ultimately, your goal is to provide resources to them, so make sure you’re meeting their needs as best you can!