HomeWorks featured in Princeton Alumni Weekly

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This January, HomeWorks Trenton was featured in Princeton Alumni Weekly, a magazine sent out to Princeton alumni on a bi-weekly basis. The article explains what life at HomeWorks is like, the meaning behind our mission, and how we differ from existing boarding programs that have tried to address the intersections of class, racial, and educational inequality.

“We’re so excited about this model because not only is it replicating boarding schools without the bureaucracy, high fixed costs, and scalability issues of running an actual school, it’s also reversing the narrative that our kids need to leave their marginalized communities in order to be successful,” our executive director Natalie Tung explains. “We know that Trenton is incredible and has so much to offer. There’s so much richness to this city. Why not stay here and have our girls work together to stay in their neighborhoods and build up their community?"

Rajiv Vinnakota, the co-founder of a network of SEED charter schools across the country, believes that HomeWorks could serve as an effective model for a national-scale initiative addressing educational inequality.

At the heart of HomeWorks is a very special group of people who care for one another. Our peer leader Darae sums up HomeWorks' values at the end of the article: “I think here, we just want to teach every one of the girls, your voice should be the loudest, your voice should be heard,” she says. “And if they don’t want to hear you, make them. There’s strength in emotion. There’s strength in love. There’s strength in community. And I think that’s why this is the place where you come back and you feel strong. You feel loved, because we want you to have open arms for each and every one that goes here.”

To read the full article, click here: https://paw.princeton.edu/article/new-take-boarding-school