Teens of Color Abroad (TOCA)

Winning the Elevate Prize would allow TOCA to continue impacting the lives of hundreds of youth of color across the U.S. while also providing a livable income to refugees dispersed throughout the world. 

In response to the ongoing pandemic, we created TOCA Online, a virtual language learning program where teens study Arabic, Spanish, and French from conversation partners, all of whom are refugees, based in Brazil, Turkey, Lebanon, Venezuela, Uruguay, Kenya, South Sudan, Burundi, and more. Our students take ten hours of language classes, participate in cultural exchange workshops with refugee guest speakers, and connect with globally-minded peers. We offer full scholarships to ensure that our programs are zero cost to students' families, and provide payment to our refugee conversation partners for their expertise. 

We've been able to launch and fund this international award-winning program with an initial grassroots campaign. The Elevate Prize funding would allow us to expand our virtual programming, employ more refugee conversation partners, hire a team, and establish scholarships for a future in-person study abroad experience.

I was once a teen who dreamt of seeing the world, but who came from a family with few resources to make that dream a reality. It wasn't until college when a professor saw my passion and sponsored my very first passport that I was able to see the world outside of the U.S. This experience catalyzed something in me and pushed me to see more of the world. I went on to study abroad in Spain, travel through Central and South America, and become a high school Spanish teacher where I had the immense privilege to stand in front of kids who look like me and encourage them to study world languages.

My students inspired me to launch Teens of Color Abroad (TOCA), a small, Black-led social impact organization that provides high school students of color with global language learning programs. My dream is to make language learning and education abroad opportunities more accessible for Black and brown youth. Our goal is to cultivate a generation of globally conscious, young ambassadors of color who continue to seek international opportunities at the college level and beyond.

When it comes to language learning in primary and secondary schools, the U.S. is lagging far behind. Only 20% of U.S. K-12 students are enrolled in a foreign language course, a vast divide from their European peers whose participation soars above 90%. On a racial level, there is an inequitable access to foreign language courses for Black/African-American high school students. This has led to an achievement and advancement gap that has dampened Black students from studying world languages and studying abroad at the collegiate level.

With TOCA, we're encouraging teens to access these opportunities now. We are a Black-led organization that offers a zero-cost, virtual language learning experience that puts students on a pathway to global citizenship. Our students study other languages, learn how to cook traditional cultural dishes, participate in guest speaker workshops led by refugees across the world, dissect global tunes to find musical similarities across genres, and more. We look forward to launching our pilot in-person study abroad language immersion program in summer 2022. 

Simply put, we're making language learning and cultural experiences fun, engaging, and accessible for high school students of color.

Our work is innovative because we solicit and respond to our student feedback. Because of their suggestions, we've expanded our offerings to include a suite of virtual programs that engage students in language learning and cultural experiences. These virtual initiatives are fun and replicate the 'sticky' cultural experiences that make studying abroad programs transformational for students.

We know that music is an excellent avenue for globally curious students to explore new cultures and languages. We host monthly Fresh Fridays, a virtual high-school-dance-meets-community-block-party on Twitch, where we've collected a community of DJs to play a 2-hour set of tunes from around the world. Our DJs spin everything every from bhangra and baile funk, to bachata.

As a response to students' requests, we've started offering coLABs, which are opportunities for students to engage in arts and culinary experiences. We've hosted cooking classes where students learn how to prepare traditional Syrian and Peruvian dishes, such as shakriyeh and papas a la huancaína. 

We're also unique in our approach in that language learning is central to our mission. We believe that access to global programming is essential, but it is language that opens the pathway. 

As a mission-driven organization, TOCA is committed to ensuring that our programming is meeting the needs of our students. Drawing on previous research, we developed a Global Identity Questionnaire to measure the impact of our programming. 

• On average, participating student’s interest in learning more about other cultures saw a nearly 10% increase as a result of our programming. By the end of the program, 96% of students expressed a desire to learn more about how other people live in different countries, while 98% expressed an interest in learning about other cultures' traditions.
• 95% of participating students left the program expressing sensitivity to discrimination, and 98% reported wanted to learn from their friends about cultural differences.
• Questionnaire responses indicate that students left our programming with a heightened awareness of how others view and experience the U.S. As a result, 97% of students who completed our summer program reported that they take different perspectives into account before drawing conclusions about the world, while 92% reported that they consider other cultural perspectives when evaluating global problems. This represents a roughly 5 percent increase compared to their views at the beginning of the program.