These races fund Peer Power’s mission to empower and inspire scholars through their innovative student-to-student tutoring program.

Peer Power's transformative work provides tutoring and mentoring assistance directly in the classroom that improves high school attendance and graduation rates, setting the stage for success and providing opportunities to excel. Additionally Peer Power’s ACT Prep University improves ACT scores by an average of 3.2 points, which then elevates college scholarship opportunities for local Shelby County Schools students. Each year, this improvement helps students collectively earn close to $1,000,000 in Tennessee HOPE scholarships.

Peer Power hires Success Coaches – or high performing University of Memphis students – as tutors and mentors, who receive college credit, gain real world experience and are paid for their work. Our Success Coaches have an 84% college graduation rate and 1 in 7 go on to become educators after they graduate. So while Peer Power is positively impacting the lives of high school students in five Shelby County Schools so far, we’re also building the pool of future educators for Memphis.

PEER POWER FAST FACTS:

• Surpassed 1,320,000 hours of tutoring and mentoring since founding
• Serves over 10,000 students at ten high schools
• Expanding by two high schools each year
• 84% of Success Coaches completed graduation requirements at the University of Memphis, a higher rate than the U of M honors college
• 64 Success Coaches have begun careers in education as teachers, guidance counselors, or administrators
• Second-largest employer of University of Memphis students, only behind the University itself
• ACT Prep University students see an average increase of 3.1 points on the ACT
• ACT Prep University students qualified for more than $5 million in TN Hope scholarships each year