The MicroSociety® program involves students in the design and management of their own society and integrates their experience into a school’s curriculum throughout the day. Using their MicroSociety program as a laboratory, students explore many of the financial, physical and environmental challenges we face today – in miniature. By connecting school to life, more than 250,000 children in 40 states have reaped the benefits from the approach.
Through our partnership, OppenheimerFunds is helping MicroSociety further expand and support its programs at the K-8 level through regional clusters and marketing efforts. The main goals of this reorganization project include expanding the number of schools in the Northeast region of the United States that implement MicroSociety programs -- creating “ambassador schools” to serve as program role models in the area -- and strengthening existing MicroSociety schools via community partnerships. By building a strong regional network of MicroSociety schools, OppenheimerFunds’ support will help MicroSociety deliver more robust, long-term and integrated programs that will have a lasting effect on the communities they serve.
Prior to the Northeast regionalization focus, MicroSociety had 12 locations scattered across six different states. Since 2005, through the support of OppenheimerFunds, MicroSociety has nearly tripled its program sites to 33, with over 6,000 additional youth being served.
Cited by the U.S. Department of Education for its impressive results in helping disadvantaged children achieve academic success, the MicroSociety program has also been shown to dramatically improve attendance and behavior. One site coordinator summarizes well MicroSociety’s benefit to students: “Micro touches on a number of educational disciplines, such as math, but also cultivates an entrepreneurial attitude and improves social skills. You get a lot of things from students that you wouldn’t expect unless you put them in this environment and when you do, they just thrive.”
For more information on MicroSociety, visit their website at www.microsociety.org.
A unique educational program, MicroSociety® encourages students to take an active role in their education by applying their classroom learning to real-life experiences. MicroSociety programs create a microcosm within the school where each student has a role in running the society through jobs such as small business owners, bankers or government officials.
