We are worldbuilders
Gulf Coast Freedom Schools is on a mission to expand each child’s impact through transformative ideas and fun learning experiences. We fuse the powers of literacy, social action, and proven, culturally-relevant programming to build confident changemakers.
Our six-week summer enrichment program helps children fall in love with reading, increases their self-esteem, cultivates positive attitudes toward learning, and reduces summer reading loss.
“Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.”
— Marian Wright Edelman, Founder of the Children's Defense Fund
Our research-based model is strengthened by a rich history of changemakers within the Freedom Schools Movement.
We push beyond traditional classrooms by creating an uplifting, culturally-relevant curriculum that is elevated by our charter from the Children’s Defense Fund. The mission of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) is to ensure every child a healthy start, a head start, a fair start, a safe start and a moral start in life, and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities.
Our research-based curriculum includes three hours of reading per day and culturally responsive books that reflect the Scholars’ own images. Classes are led by caring and supportive college students that serve as Servant Leader Interns (teachers).
Our program is proven to successfully address summer reading loss and a related decrease in students’ motivation to read. In addition, we support children and families in the areas of parent and family involvement, civic engagement and social action, intergenerational leadership development, and health — physical, mental, and nutritional. With the support of caring adults and communities we will aid our children’s successful journey into adulthood.
Meet our team and Board
Our dedicated team and Board of Directors are committed to our scholar’s success.
Our program in the news
View articles about Gulf Coast Freedom Schools in the news and learn about our impact.
A deep history of education and empowerment
The CDF Freedom Schools® program is rooted in the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, when college students around the country traveled to Mississippi to secure justice and voting rights for Black citizens.
Early Freedom Schools worked to keep Black children safe and provided these children with educational experiences that were not offered in Mississippi’s public schools.
College student volunteers taught traditional subjects as well as Black history and constitutional rights. The curriculum encouraged children to celebrate their histories and become independent thinkers and agents of change in their own communities.
Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) opened the first two CDF Freedom Schools® sites in 1995 to address the needs of children who lacked access to high-quality literacy programs in the summer. The program today is designed to improve reading, language skills and interpersonal relationships; strengthen families; and connect children to medical and social services to develop in these participants the skills needed to improve conditions for children, families and communities.
The core of the CDF Freedom Schools® program is a research-based Integrated Reading Curriculum (IRC) that fosters literacy. Children’s Defense Fund has been at the forefront of raising consciousness about the fact that fewer than ten percent of children’s books in the United States are about children of color.
