Cultivating STEM communities to grow tomorrows minds.
With the continued success and growth of ILITE each year, we soon realized that the pool of young minds which would benefit from STEM activities was far larger than what could be supported by one team and by our schools. Just like community recreational soccer, basketball, football and wrestling programs provide access to a broader community of children than can participate in school varsity sports we knew we needed a community based STEM program to allow all of our promising young minds access to STEM activities.
With that need in mind, our students and mentors started the non-profit US STEM foundation with the goal of opening community STEM centers where robotics, rocketry, cyber challenge, math olympiad, and other STEM related activities can be conducted and coached by adult volunteers in the same way these parents support activities like sports and scouting. Through a small grant, US STEM was able to fully fund and sponsor two community FLL teams this year, one of which took first place in research at the Virginia FLL competition.
Today in partnership with other local community service organizations and the county government, US STEM will this year rehabilitate an abandoned firehouse to open the first of these community mind centers. In the words of Mr. David Boyd, the president of US STEM and and an ILITE mentor, "In the same way ILITE has inspired many children including my own, it has inspired us to develop this community model which we hope will inspire other communities to implement similar programs to broaden access to STEM activities for our young people."
