An international service organization dedicated to aiding local youth has returned to its roots here at Duke.
Concern and Help for the Advancement of Neighborhood Children through Education, also known as CHANCE, is a student-led organization that tutors underprivileged students. The nonprofit was founded at Duke in 1985 with the support of former Duke President Terry Sanford and other University leaders. Although it has expanded to many other universities in the United States and abroad, its presence has since diminished in Durham. CHANCE founder Eugene Lee, Trinity ’87, has returned to campus, however, to revitalize the program.
As a sophomore at Duke, Lee said he realized that a program for tutoring local students was not present at Duke. As a result, Lee and some friends founded CHANCE, which has expanded to Harvard University, Columbia University, New York University and Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea.
The program in Durham began to deteriorate during the 17 years after graduation when Lee lived in South Korea, Lee said.
“This is an organization that started in ’85, and it’s still going—even without Duke,” he said.
Ultimately, CHANCE hopes to expand its chapters to more countries, especially in the Middle East, where poverty and poor education systems are widespread, Lee said. Because CHANCE has been successful at a variety of universities, Lee is determined to bring it back home.
“I want to revamp CHANCE everywhere, but before I move to other universities, I can’t let my alma mater down,” Lee said. “The foundation has to be strong before I move on so other universities can model us.”
CHANCE is a free tutoring program that focuses on helping public high school students maximize their capabilities inside and outside of a classroom setting. For the Durham chapter, Duke students provide the tutoring and local businesses partner with the program to provide the high school students with meals and additional activities, such as field trips.
A lack of commitment once Lee left caused the fall of the organization, said freshman Bo Peng, an emerging CHANCE leader. Peng added that the program requires significant time and energy from its leaders.
When the organization first started in the 1980s, it was run solely by volunteers using local donations. CHANCE was unable to sustain this, however, because it could not afford an office or a full-time executive board like other thriving nonprofits because it was a student group. This caused many of the leaders to leave the organization to pursue their personal careers and family responsibilities, Peng said.
In order to solve this problem, Lee is reaching out to a wide range of students to act as leaders in the program. The program currently tutors students using East Campus facilities, but CHANCE is expanding its resources to West Campus in order to attract more Duke students, Lee said. It is also seeking a space that can accommodate a large group of high school students. Under Lee’s attempt at revitalizing CHANCE, businesses will start sponsoring community involvement activities, such as museum trips, free meals, school tours and athlete speakers.
“We also try to build knowledge and equip [the CHANCE participants] with tools that our parents gave to us,” he said. “They will be aware of things such as work ethics, responsibility, confidence and self esteem. It’s like having a well-rounded support system away from home.”
Some Duke students are eager to revitalize CHANCE.
Freshman CHANCE leader Katie Shpanskaya, for example, said she wants public high school students to experience education beyond the classroom.
“As a kid, I went to museums all the time and learned so much from them, and I feel that is something all kids should experience,” Shpanskaya said. “CHANCE is more than just a tutoring program. We want the students to experience what we experienced as kids—we want to go beyond education.”
David Malone, director of the Service Learning Program and the director of undergraduate studies for the education department, said CHANCE represents a long-standing commitment Duke students have to the Durham community, particularly in education.
“The relationship between Duke and Durham is of central importance to our mission here at Duke,” Malone said. “We need to think more critically about the integration of our civic and intellectual lives—student engagement with the community provides an opportunity for this.”
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