One winter day 12 years ago, a Johns Hopkins University biomedical engineering graduate student named Sarah Hemminger was on her way to the East Baltimore campus, sitting at a stoplight watching students mill around Dunbar High School.
She thought of her husband, Ryan, who after a series of family tragedies had been empowered and supported by a remarkable group of teachers who took it upon themselves to supply him with food, rides to school, tutoring and anything else he needed—they even paid his family’s utility bills—to provide that sense of safety children need to succeed.
“I realized that if I could reach out to those students at Dunbar, wonderful things could happen,” she says.
The result was Thread, a now nationally celebrated program that identifies academically underperforming ninth graders and assigns them as many as five volunteer “family members”—led by a volunteer head of family—to provide unconditional support, 24 hours a day, for the duration of high school and six years beyond. Thread’s ambition is a radical redefinition of family. Volunteers become deeply invested in a mutually nurturing relationship, and no matter what students do, the volunteers never give up on them.
Of students who have been in Thread for five years, 92 percent have graduated from high school, and 90 percent have been accepted to college. And 80 percent of alums have completed a four- or two-year degree or certificate program.
Today, Thread boasts 255 students and alums, more than 800 volunteers, 175 collaborators—who act as an extended family in Greater Baltimore—and a paid staff of 20.
About 30 percent of Johns Hopkins medical students are Thread volunteers, and Thread has partnered with the school of medicine’s Office of Student Diversity to create the Diversity and Academic Advancement Summer Institute, which enrolls Thread high school students and recent graduates in five-week paid summer internships in laboratories, clinics and offices at the school of medicine and Baltimore businesses. This year, the institute found jobs for 34 Thread students in Johns Hopkins Medicine labs and offices.
